Montgomery County Voters Rank First in Apathy

By Sonny Goldreich

In a primary election marked by low voter turnout statewide, Montgomery County distinguished itself by caring the least.

Only 102,263 out of 630,254 eligible county voters bothered to participate in yesterday's poll, which effectively decided our next county executive and council, governor and who we will send to the General Assembly and Congress, given Democrats' overwhelmingly advantage in party registration.

That's a voter turnout rate of 16.23 percent, the lowest in the state.

Maryland Board of Elections

The county that should be the junkyard dog of state politics showed one more time that it's a pocket poodle that can be carried around and played with like a toy.

I won't even go into the fact that Montgomery voters overwhelmingly spurned two home-grown gubernatorial candidates in favor of Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, a former Prince George's County delegate. Everyone has their reasons for choosing a candidate.

But in an election characterized by a hotly contested county executive race and open council and State House seats, fewer than one out of six of Montgomery County's voters showed up yesterday or during eight days of early voting that ended Thursday.

You want to know how pathetic that is? Baltimore County reported a higher turnout, with 105,088 citizens voting, even though Montgomery County has 47.9 percent more eligible voters. That's a rate of 24.67 percent of voters who performed their most basic duty. Baltimore County's turnout rate beat Montgomery by 52 percent.

I should note that from its lofty perch where it sees little on the ground in Maryland, the Washington Post editorialized on election day that the primary vote should be moved back to September to improve turnout. The date was changed to "comply with a new federal law making it easier for overseas service members to vote. The law requires that absentee ballots be mailed 45 days in advance of federal elections in November; officials said a September date didn’t provide enough time." But it seems that June is a month for vacations and such, when folks (like WPost editors?)  have no time to vote or pay attention to the hundreds of campaign flyers and email clogging their mailboxes.

The problem is that the WPost argument doesn't pass the numbers test. State election results show that the primary turnout has been dismal in Maryland, and especially in Montgomery, no matter when it is held.

For the 2010 gubernatorial primary held in September, Montgomery County had a 20 percent voter turnout rate, compared to 25.4 percent statewide. For the 2012 presidential primary staged in April, MoCo turned out 15.8 percent, compared to 18.8 percent statewide.

What we have here is a bunch of lazy saps, especially in Montgomery County, with its huge population of professionally politically engaged types like federal workers, congressional staff, lobbyists, association officials, union activists, random lawyers and fundraisers and assorted other percentage-takers.

For the 102,263 Montgomery County residents who voted this time, you can pat yourselves on the backs for caring who represents you.

For the 527,991 losers who are eligible to vote but wouldn't get off their asses, you can go to hell, because you have affirmed the contempt Annapolis holds for Montgomery County.

So, no more whining when the General Assembly screws us once again at budget time and cheats us of desperately needed funding to operate our overcrowded schools or to build new ones.

Your complaints about high taxes and Montgomery County's function as the state ATM will be ignored.

Nobody in Annapolis will care about our overwhelmed subway and road systems.

Montgomery County had the opportunity to show Annapolis that we're pissed off about getting pissed on and instead most voters pissed away the chance.

You didn't vote. So you don't count.

Crowded schools threaten economic growth in Silver Spring and throughout Montgomery County

By Sonny Goldreich

Popular (and Fox News-fevered) imagination holds that Montgomery County schools are overrun and overwhelmed by a wave of immigrant children, especially in the Silver Spring corridor.

And there is some truth in that view. But it’s also true that the county is trying to cope with a wave of privileged white students, with some of the most crowded schools in Bethesda and the new boomtown area of Clarksburg.

The fact is that the county remains a popular place to raise families but education resources are overtaxed for communities of all income levels and demographic backgrounds. That’s the case both for schools in the struggling Wheaton, Kennedy and Northwood clusters and for the nationally celebrated “W” high schools—Walt Whitman, Walter Johnson and Winston Churchill.

That’s the message in the new Fiscal Year 2015 Annual School Test approved last week, which determines whether there will be a moratorium or payments imposed on home developers who want to build where classrooms are overcrowded.

So many schools are overcrowded at various levels that some new residential development could be blocked by a moratorium, which kicks in when a school cluster exceeds 120 percent of enrollment capacity.

Wheaton High School is not overcrowded and a new facility is under construction. But its middle
 school cluster already is so far beyond capacity that it could trigger a moratorium on new housing.  

The very real possibility exists of a housing development moratorium this year—which could impact the Georgia Avenue corridor stretching from Wheaton to Glenmont—because of severe overcrowding currently afflicting area schools. That’s because middle schools in the Wheaton High School cluster already are at 119.2 percent utilization. So the area faces a possible development halt when fiscal year 2015 starts July 1, if any new housing is approved and the rate ticks above 120 percent.

Wheaton High School itself is not considered a problem because it is now only 21 students above its 1,320 capacity and it will have room to grow to enrollment of 1,596, with a new facility and separate Edison High School next door now under construction.

Elsewhere at the high school level, Clarksburg also faces a possible moratorium, with a 116 percent utilization rate. In Bethesda, Whitman’s rate stands at 112.7 percent, followed by Walter Johnson (112.6 percent).

New housing development already is subject to a special crowded school facility payment in 16 of the county’s 25 high school clusters. The fee kicks in when high, middle or elementary schools exceed 105 percent of their enrollment capacity. The payment rate is $19,514 per elementary school student, $25,411 per middle school student, and $28,501 per high school student.

In the Silver Spring and Downcounty area, Blair has a 113.5 percent utilization rate at the middle school level, followed by Northwood (112.8 percent for middle schools and 111.9 percent for the high school). Einstein High School has a 108.6 percent rate and Kennedy’s middle school level is at 107 percent.

The somewhat contrary lesson to be learned is that county officials need to encourage more growth—commercial growth, especially east of Connecticut Avenue—by lowering tax and planning barriers. That would add the kind of high-paying private sector jobs that broaden the corporate and personal income tax base in Montgomery County as it faces a future of limited federal government expansion.

You won’t find any hint of that challenge in the latest school test report, which, as always, is a relatively bloodless document. It makes no reference to zoning density or gridlock traffic.

But there is a telling detail that suggests how the economy has hit even Montgomery County’s rich. The report noted that a “pronounced increase in enrollment is also attributed to students entering MCPS from nonpublic schools. This trend is driven by the reputation of the public schools and, more recently, to the impacts of the recession on households’ ability to afford nonpublic schools.”

The report also notes that very little enrollment growth is due to the proliferation of new multifamily housing built before and after the recession.

The report said that “There are many more existing homes available for resale, and rental units for lease, than there are new residential units coming on the market in any given year. Therefore, turnover of existing residential units has a much greater impact on enrollment change than new home sales and new apartment rentals.”

As always, the Planning Board routinely approved the report June 12 without raising basic issues like high taxes, the school test scores achievement gap, language hurdles, or racial and income demographics.

Those are the sort of red meat debates that have seized election year public attention, which was briefly captured by a county report in April that compared 11 high-poverty high schools in the Silver Spring and Gaithersburg areas to 14 low-poverty high schools serving Bethesda, Chevy Chase, Potomac and other neighborhoods.

Overall, the Office of Legislative Oversight (OLO) study described a back-to-the-future Montgomery County similar to 60 years ago, that has become unofficially resegregated despite the 1954 Supreme Court Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that declared separate black and white schools unconstitutional.

The report finds “an increase in the stratification of MCPS high schools by income, race, and ethnicity. OLO also finds that the achievement gap between high- and low-poverty high schools has widened among a majority of measures considered,” including graduation rates, dropout rates and college admission test performance.

The county Board of Education will likely struggle this year with how to address the fact that its system of student choice and magnet programs has failed to close the achievement gap or better integrate schools in the Downcounty and Northeast consortia or the Gaithersburg area. The obvious answer—creating magnet programs countywide and opening high-performing schools to all students—is an obvious non-starter, given the prohibitive political clout of the W schools’ parents.

So that will leave the Planning Board and the County Council tasked with creating a regulatory and tax environment that will steer much more future commercial development to Montgomery’s east side, which will attract high-performing students.

Let’s hope they remember that when the election is over.

You read it here first

After a month online, it's time for That's Silver Spring to beat its chest a little.

Today, the Gazette (the Washington Post local that killed my commercial real estate column after nine years in April), finally chased my June 12th story on redevelopment of The Blairs, which is the biggest project to move forward in Silver Spring since Discovery Communications moved there in 2003.

So what else have the Gazette and its owner, The Washington Post, not been covering?

How about the future of the National Labor College, which had been a source of burning concern for both the Gazette and the Post? Well, neither has bothered to chase my story that the Amalgamated Transit Union plans to buy the prime property in the White Oak science gateway area.

And neither has followed my story that another furniture store has moved into the space vacated by Giant Food in Plaza Del Mercado, where nearby residents have been calling and petitioning and praying for a new grocery store.

And neither news outlet cares enough about my backyard to duplicate my report that WMATA plans to demolish and redevelop the abandoned KFC eyesore it owns next to the Glenmont Metro station.

And finally, neither of my Big Print rivals care like I do that Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett has sharpened a stick to spur redevelopment in his neighborhood by soliciting plans to build a grocery store next to where Giant Food stands in the way of repopulating the almost empty Burtonsville Crossing strip mall.

So, keep reading the Gazette or Washington Post if you want to hire a handyman. But read That's Silver Spring first if you want the news.

Tower scales back first phase in giant redevelopment of The Blairs complex

By Sonny Goldreich

The Tower Cos. has scaled back the size of the first two residential buildings in its massive redevelopment of The Blairs complex in Silver Spring, under a site plan the firm filed with Montgomery County.

The ultimate 20-year build-out still calls for a 3.8 million-square-foot gateway neighborhood bordering DC, which would double the number of existing residential units to 2,800 and the amount of commercial space to 450,000 square feet. The site plan will not be available to the public until it is assigned to a county Department of Planning reviewer by the end of the month, but the first two apartment buildings have been redesigned to present less of a monolithic face to Eastern Avenue, according to company officials who have been conducting meetings with community groups in recent weeks.

What that means is the two apartment buildings will offer a combined 500 units, instead of the 527 included in the master and preliminary plans approved last year. Tower’s goal is to welcome the public to enjoy the acres of parks and new retail space as commuters come off the nearby Metro subway or drive by on their way home from work.

“This will not be a walled off, private development. This will be something that you’re really encouraged to interact with your neighbors,” Luis Bernardo, principal and partner at Design Collective, the project’s architect, said at a Blairs community meeting last month, which can be watched online. “We’ve really scaled down the project and had it stepped down to the community.”

The first 275-unit building will reach a height of 14 floors nearest the center of the 28-acre complex. The second 225-unit structure will max out at 18 floors. But they both will step down to seven floors, then five, along Eastern Avenue. The units fronting Eastern will look like town houses, similar to the Blair Towns, a 78-unit apartment project on the Colesville Road side of the complex that Tower completed in 2004.

“The original plan had 14 stories coming all the way up to Eastern Avenue,” Bernardo said.

The buildings also will feature design elements that mark a dramatic break with the drab uniform red brick of the vacant four 5-story Blair Towers buildings that were completed in 1959 and the neighboring 1960s-era glass high-rises. Plans include several types of windows, masonry color and roof gardens to provide “a very rich and complex read to the architecture that wasn’t present in the earlier buildings,” Bernardo said.

The first two apartment buildings will focus construction on the lower half of the property bordering DC. In the upper half, Tower plans to redevelop 85,196 square feet of retail and restaurant space, which includes a 54,000-square-foot Giant Foods grocery store that has 10 years left on its lease.

Ultimately, the project calls for a total of 125,000-square-feet of retail, a 200-room hotel and a 200,000-square-foot office building, which will replace a 72,562 square-foot one. The hotel and office space are part of Tower's Phase 2 site plan, which has not yet been submitted to the county.

The Blairs complex sits within easy walking distance of the Metro and is bounded on the northwest by Colesville Road, on the south by Blair Mill Road, on the northeast by East-West Highway and on the southwest by Eastern Avenue.

Demolition of the four Blair Towers buildings should start later this year after permit approval, with site plan clearance expected by the end of the year, according to Sri Velamati, Tower’s vice president of development. Construction on the first building should start by the middle of 2015 with delivery by the end of 2016. The construction of the smaller building should be completed by late 2017.

The buildings will share an underground parking garage, which is part of Tower’s broader goal to “turn parking lots into parks,” Velamati said during the community meeting last month.

The firm sped up plans for a public dog park, which will be part of the first phase construction, rather than follow after the two apartment buildings are completed, as originally planned.

They Came to Save Glenmont, Not Bury It

By Sonny Goldreich

The heavy equipment replaced the lightweight speeches in Glenmont Monday, when a demolition crew knocked down a second gas station as part of construction of an interchange designed to speed traffic through the often gridlocked intersection of Georgia Avenue and Randolph Road.

Southbound Georgia Avenue lost a lane for part of the day, following a ceremonial groundbreaking Wednesday that drew more than a dozen elected and appointed state and county officials who vowed that the $74.8 million project will improve life not just for those stuck in rush hour but for the people (like me) who live in the community at the end of the Metro Red Line.

It will be months before workers in steel-toe boots arrive to begin the real job of creating a Randolph bypass by lowering it 25 feet below Georgia. In the meantime, County Executive Ike Leggett headlined the event last week, when a bunch of people in suits picked up shovels to turn dirt in what looked like a long, narrow coffin.

But they came to save Glenmont, not bury it.

They promised that the interchange—scheduled for completion in winter 2016—would encourage redevelopment of the aging Glenmont Shopping Center strip mall, which county planners envision as a pedestrian-friendly, transit-oriented town center under a new master plan.

“This project will make a real difference in getting vehicles where they need to go more efficiently—and just as importantly—provide safe crossings for pedestrians and bicyclists,” Leggett said.

County Councilman Hans Reimer said the interchange would help transform the identity of Glenmont, from a car-centered crossroads to a walkable neighborhood.

Sen. Jennie Forehand said the interchange would improve the environment by moving cars that now sit idle and spew exhaust.

Del. Ben Kramer said the project would be a catalyst for redevelopment, recalling how when McDonald’s arrived 50 years ago, “We knew Glenmont was on the map.”

That’s a tall order for a highway project that spent more than a decade in planning stages before it was fully funded with a combination of federal, state, and county money.

The fact is Glenmont is already on the commuter map and that’s part of the problem. The two-block commercial strip and surrounding residential neighborhoods often suffer from standstill traffic as single drivers wait in line to get into one of the two Metro garages; or get through the Georgia Avenue lights on their way to jobs in Wheaton, Silver Spring or DC; or crowd Randolph Road—the Poor Man’s Intercounty Connector—which winds from Rt. 1 to I-270 (where it is called Cherry Hill Road and Montrose Road at the east and west ends).

Glenmont is on the map of the ICC—twice—drawing speed demons from north and east off the toll road. Glenmont is marked as the southbound destination at the ICC’s Georgia Avenue Exit. And Glenmont is marked as the westbound destination at the Layhill Road exit.

 

But the question remains whether the construction of the interchange—which is scheduled for completion by the end of 2016—will help or hurt the area.

That’s a serious issue for the strip mall, a 196,380-square-foot relic that was built in stages from 1956 to 1986. The center has been the focus of county redevelopment goals since before the Glenmont Metro Red Line station opened in 1998.

The area should be a prime target for developers, with mixed-use high-density retail and residential zoning in place under the 1997 sector plan and expanded with the revised plan for the 711-acre study area passed last year. The state also approved Glenmont as an enterprise zone with tax credits offered to encourage new investment.

But the 13 owners of the 19-acre strip mall’s 15 properties have frustrated dreams of renewal, and sat on their hands while many Metro stations inspired intense development around the county and the entire DC region.

And why not? With several multi-generational tenants and property owners, the mall is mostly occupied, providing stable income for a group of passive landlords. Some expressed little interest in redeveloping during Glenmont sector plan deliberations, as I reported for the Gazette last year.

The center is mostly occupied by local small businesses alongside anchors Shoppers, Staples and CVS.

So what happens if the center’s owners again ignore the chance to cash in and another decade passes with no redevelopment after the interchange opens?

One possibility is what happened to Burtonsville Crossing, a now mostly empty strip mall that was laid low by another interchange that opened in 2004 at the intersection of US Rt. 29 and Old Columbia Pike. The nation’s largest strip center operator bought the fully occupied property in 2003 only to see it collapse as tenants fled when the interchange diverted traffic and a mall across the street tripled in size.

Something similar could happen in Glenmont, where two blocks north, the 1960s-era Glenmont Privacy World garden apartment complex has been approved for high-density redevelopment. Plans call for tearing down the 352-unit property and replacing it with a 1,500-unit mix of high-rise and town house units.

And the plan also includes 90,000 square feet of commercial space, room enough for a modern grocery and ten or more small tenants who might want to move down the block from Glenmont Shopping Center.

The new Glenmont interchange will run Randolph Rd. under Georgia Ave.

Leggett doesn’t think that will happen.

“They’ve learned from their mistakes,” he said, in reference to planners of the Burtonsville interchange.

He noted that the new Glenmont project includes a service road for local traffic and other elements to preserve access to the shopping center. 

The interchange will create new turn lanes and ramps and one additional through lane on Georgia Avenue for a total of three through lanes in each direction, according to the State Highway Administration. In reality, Georgia Avenue already has three through lanes going north and south, but during rush hour, one lane effectively becomes a stalled right-turn lane going either east or west on Randolph. Additional improvements for pedestrians include extending the Glenmont Greenway Trail on the west side of Georgia Avenue an additional 900 feet south past Randolph Road and adding new sidewalks.

In theory, this should improve safety and access for pedestrians trying to cross either Georgia or Randolph to get to the strip mall or its imagined town center replacement.

Getting local folks out of their cars could be the key to all the rosy predictions for Glenmont’s future. Right now, almost nobody walks in the area, unless it’s to the Metro. But even that is relatively rare, with Glenmont the least used end-of-the-line stop in the entire subway system.

State transportation officials expect that to change, and they predict the Glenmont interchange will help meet a goal of doubling statewide transit ridership by 2020.

And there, Glenmont already has a major advantage over sparsely-populated Burtonsville, which would still qualify as semi-rural if not for the fact that it sits at a super-highway interchange.

“In Glenmont, we have large numbers of residential units right on top of the shopping center,” Leggett said.

In fact, there are already 3,100 housing units within easy walking distance of the Glenmont Shopping Center, which is more than 10 times the number in the Burtonsville plan area, according to county planners. Glenmont is surrounded by 2,120 garden apartments in complexes that have the opportunity for high-density rezoning similar to Privacy World.

County planners expect the total number of residential units could grow to 8,900 over the life of the new sector plan (including 5,342 apartments and condos), with jobs expanding from the current 873 to 2,350.

So Glenmont is long past the build-it-and-they-will-come stage. It’s more like build-it-while-you-can-they’re already here.

County adds stick to carrots to spur redevelopment of Burtonsville Crossing stip mall

By Sonny Goldreich 

Carrots haven’t worked to encourage redevelopment of the nearly empty Burtonsville Crossing strip mall, where Giant Food has a veto to protect its neighboring store. 

So now Montgomery County officials whittled a stick in the form of a solicitation to use public land to build a competing grocery as the anchor to a new village center.

That achieves the dual purpose of dodging Giant’s tenant block and giving the municipal finger to the Dutch-owned firm for standing in the way of reviving Burtonsville.

Giant Food started a tenant exodus at Burtonsville Crossing
in 2010,  the strip mall soon became a mostly empty shell.

County officials won’t acknowledge it, but the stick is buried deep in a formal Request for Qualifications to redevelop a park-and-ride site adjoining Burtonsville Crossing. The RFQ—which had a May 30 response deadline—spells out that one plan that would meet the county’s goals would be a new grocery on the 4-acre parcel as part of a project to redevelop the adjoining Burtonsville Crossing.

No other specific plan is mentioned.

County Executive Ike Leggett said he still hopes that carrots will work to attract development to his Burtonsville community surrounding the crossroads of US Rt. 29 and MD Rt.198.

He noted the new Burtonsville neighborhood plan adopted in 2012, which includes zoning to encourage mixed-use commercial and residential development. The county followed up with an enterprise zone last December that offers tax credits for capital investment.

“We’re still trying to negotiate with Giant Food to move forward,” Leggett said in an interview.

He did not want to comment further on the situation for fear of spoiling talks with Giant, a Landover-based chain that was acquired by Royal Ahold, a Dutch conglomerate, in 1998.

Development officials have high hopes for Burtonsville, which serves as a gateway to Silver Spring and would be the northern terminus of an 11-mile rapid bus transit system for Rt. 29. The 2012 plan calls for multifamily development and a village green to add a sense of place to an area that started as a rural crossroads and has evolved into a car-centered business district with little surrounding residential space.

But Burtonsville Crossing has stood as a sign of decay for almost a decade, since the State Highway Administration built an interchange at Rt. 29 and Rt. 198 that steered traffic away from the 129,726-square-foot strip mall. The real death watch began in 2010, when Giant moved across the street from the center it once owned.

At issue is a right of refusal Giant holds to block tenants at Burtonsville Crossing that could compete with its new store, which relocated to the Burtonsville Town Center strip mall on the west side of Old Columbia Pike. Giant’s veto carries over from 2003, when it sold Burtonsville Crossing and six other grocery-anchored malls to Columbia, SC-based Edens (formerly Edens & Avant), which owns 111 East Coast retail centers.

Other tenants followed Giant out of Burtonsville Crossing and the mall has been more than two thirds vacant for years.

Tina Benjamin, director of special projects for the county Department of Economic Development, would not say whether anyone has proposed a grocery-anchored plan in response to the park-and-ride RFQ.

“We did this to hopefully encourage redevelopment,” she said. “I think there is a bright future for Burtonsville.”

But a close reading of the Burtonsville RFQ provides the puzzle pieces that could allow a developer to sidestep Giant’s veto by building a grocery next door to Burtonsville Crossing.

The RFQ—issued May 2—is short on details other than saying the county seeks a private partner to “help remake Burtonsville into a signature location by …. creating a vibrant mixed-use development that will generate economic activity in the community, including consumer retail outlets such as a grocery store…”

The RFQ also says of the park-and-rise site that, “This strategically located Parcel will help define the village center, which also includes the largely vacant Burtonsville Crossing Shopping Plaza that abuts the property. Developers are encouraged to consider how the redevelopment of the shopping plaza and the Parcel can complement each other.”

Benjamin said she could not comment on the county’s redevelopment preferences for the park-and-ride site, which shares space with two acres of state-owned property.

“That is to be determined based on the solicitation responses and won’t be announced until the county chooses a developer,” she said.

In the meantime, other property owners already have invested in Burtonsville’s future.

On the north side of Rt. 29, Starpoint Plaza, a small mixed-use office building first proposed in 2008, is nearing completion. The 25,239-square-foot project will include 8,431 square feet of first floor retail space, according to broker Lee & Associates' website. The building sits at the southwest corner of the intersection of Rt. 198 and Star Pointe Lane in the Burtonsville Industrial Area. Starpoint Plaza, 4009 Sandy Spring Road, will open next to where community opposition and zoning complexities have stalled a 147,000-square-foot EZ Storage facility for years.

The project is designed to meet silver certification by the U.S. Green Building Council.

Abutting Burtonsville Crossing, the four-building Burtonsville Office Park is in new hands after the previous owner defaulted on its mortgage. DC-based Bernstein Management Corp. paid $8.4 million for the 116,000 square feet complex, which sold in a 2012 courthouse auction. The property traded at a very deep discount, after previously selling for almost $22.4 million in 2005.

As for Burtonsville Crossing, it’s down to a Starbucks and handful of other small tenants after the Dress Barn held its closing sale last month. (I always wondered who thought selling dresses from a barn was a good idea. And who would buy dresses from a barn?)

The mall is so empty that it has begun to attract alternative uses. I recently saw a group of people holding hands in a circle between two garbage trucks one Saturday morning, after drivers slowly cruised around the vast empty parking lot in the lumbering vehicles.

So maybe if a village center isn’t in the cards, Burtonsville Crossing could live on as a trash haulers’ rodeo.

Homeland security at Metro's Glenmont KFC!

By Sonny Goldreich

Metro installed a set of concrete traffic barriers to protect the abandoned KFC it owns next to the Glenmont subway station.

You read that right.

The crumbling, boarded-over former fast food joint now sits behind eight round two-foot-tall concrete planters that bar vehicle access to the entrance and exit.

It’s like we have our own little national monument to squalor right here in Silver Spring.

This is the first concrete response (get it?) from the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority—Metro’s operator—since an article I wrote last month shamed its neglect of the KFC, which has stood as one of the area's worst eyesores since a Ride-On bus smashed through the front window in 2011.

Metro announced that it plans to tear down and seek a private partner to redevelop the site, which occupies what should be prime real estate right next to the last stop on the eastern leg of the Red Line. Actually, Metro didn't so much as announce the news as send it in an email message to an aide to County Council Councilmember Nancy Navarro, D-District 4.

There’s no sign yet of a permit application to demolish the ruin. But at least the traffic barriers should discourage folks from using the KFC as a dump.

And, more good news, Metro hauled away the toilets and other junk that were piled up behind the building.

So, anyway.