Transit union moving HQ to National Labor College site after $31 million sale

By Sonny Goldreich

UPDATE: The Amalgamated Transit Union today officially announced plans to move its international headquarters from DC to the site of the National Labor College in Silver Spring, which I reported yesterday.

The sale includes this 72,000-square-foot building completed in 2006.

About 40 to 50 union staff will make the move to the new White Oak headquarters, which ATU president Larry Hanley confirmed sold for $31.4 million. The facility will offer classes to train union and community leaders, he said, but it will no longer provide college degrees, as the NLC did before closing its doors in April.

The ATU will revive the "original purpose of the training center from 1970, training working union member and community leaders," Hanley said in an interview.

He also scoffed at a lawsuit against the college seeking to block the sale filed last month by DC-based Monument Realty, which signed a letter of intent to buy the property in December. The suit will not complicate the sale of the campus, Hanley said.

"We're the labor movement," he said. "We don't respond to bullies. This is just a land grab by a greedy developer and it was laughed out of court by the judge."

A judge denied Monument's motion for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction on July 25. The court determined that the firm had suffered no irreparable harm and had "no chance chance of success," Hanley said.

"Today the ATU has stepped up and assumed a greater leadership role in the molding of minds, values and progressive reform for both Canada and the United States, where we represent more than 190,000 workers. The state of the art conference and training center will again be a hub of activity for ATU and the entire labor movement," Hanley said in a press release. "It represents a new beginning in terms of our capacity to train not only our leaders and members, but also those who work every day to improve the life of our society."

ORIGINAL STORY 7/29/2014
The Amalgamated Transit Union plans to move its national headquarters from DC to the site of the debt-crippled National Labor College in Silver Spring, where it will continue to offer classes after paying $31.4 million for the prime property.

The deal was expected to close by Thursday (July 31), after the Maryland Board of Public Works voted to approve the sale and forgive a claim on $2.75 million granted by the state to support the college since 1999. Most proceeds of the sale will go to pay off debt owed to the Bank of America, which holds a first lien on the property and has delayed moving to foreclosure for more than two years.

“The whole house of labor is very disappointed about this turn of events but we’re glad to keep it in the labor family,” college president Paula Peinovich, said during the board’s July 23 meeting.

The property—which has dormitory, classroom and office space totaling 287,071 square feet—sold for far less than its $47.4 million assessed value after two earlier deals fell apart.

The college closed its doors in April after offering university degrees since 1974. The campus was founded and backed by $5 million annually from the AFL-CIO, but it ran into financial trouble during a recent expansion, including construction of the Lane Kirkland Center, a 72,000-square-foot conference facility completed in 2007 with the help of $2 million from state taxpayers.

The transit union will acquire the 45.8 acres campus and its 10 buildings, which sit in the middle of the White Oak science gateway master plan approved Tuesday by the Montgomery County Council. It is a mile south of the FDA headquarters complex, next to a Beltway exit at 10000 New Hampshire Avenue.

Gov. Martin O’Malley cast the only vote against approving the sale and forgiving the state grants, which are supposed to be paid back if the property changes hands. He wanted to defer a vote until officials had a chance to further explore the college’s assets.

But state Comptroller Peter Franchot and Treasuer Nancy Kopp accepted the college’s argument that the property likely would fetch a lower price at auction, should Bank of America proceeded with foreclosure next month.

Sue Payne, an aide to state Del. Pat McDonough, R-District 7 (Baltimore and Harford Counties), testified against approving the sale, which she said amounted to an “inside contract” between affiliates of the AFL-CIO, while “the taxpayers are left holding the bag.”

O’Malley also questioned why the $2.75 million in state grants couldn’t have been folded into the price paid by the transit union.

Attorney James Gentile, the college’s general counsel, responded that the transit union offer was a fair one, considering that an earlier deal struck last year with Reid Temple and the Montgomery County Housing Opportunities Commission was valued at only about $27 million before the sale fell apart.

He said the college had hoped to pay off the state and stay afloat as an online school, but the real estate market made that impossible and the threat of foreclosure did not give the college time to wait for a better deal.

“This is the best offer we got,” Gentile said. “We originally hoped to sell the property for significantly more money.”

The sale to the transit union would cover only a $31.08 million settlement with the bank and broker fees, he said.

Gentile added that the labor college is its own non-profit entity that operates independently from the AFL-CIO, which no longer owns the property.

The sale will also support the state’s interest in preserving the site as a labor education facility, because the transit group plans to train its own staff as well as other union workers, Peinovich said. The property will remain the home of the college’s Bonnie Ladin Union Skills Program, which will offer expanded continuing education classes for union leaders, staff, and activists, she said.

The transit union also will preserve the property’s national monument to workers killed on the job.

The union's move to Silver Spring also reflects a recent commitment to train its leadership and members across the nation in political engagement to support increased transit spending.

"Our board voted ... to buy the National Labor College so we could start a permanent training center," ATU president Larry Hanley said in April during the Labor Notes union organizing conference.

State turns Glenmont history into piñata as it demolishes 1953 fire station

By Sonny Goldreich

The State Highway Administration knocked down a big piece of Glenmont history today, as a crew demolished the clock tower at the fire station that protected the north Silver Spring neighborhood since 1953

Making room for a road interchange, a worker operating a Hitachi excavator tractor treated station #18 (formerly Kensington Volunteer Fire Department No. 18) like a piñata, repeatedly poking and prodding its 40-foot tower with a steel beam until it toppled.

“I was in that tower many times to stretch the fire hoses to dry them,” said Richard Bourque, a former cadet at the station.

The demolition is part of a $74.8-million project to build a traffic bypass around Glenmont, where Randolph Road will run beneath Georgia Avenue. The knockdown of the old station will be followed by the start of construction of a new $14.8 million station in the fall across Georgia at the southwest corner of the intersection with Randolph. The 19,150-square-foot structure will be about three times the size of the old one, which cost $93,000 to build, including $18,000 for the land.

When the station opened, community leaders staged a parade that drew more than 1,000 visitors.

Now, Bourque stood alone in the hot morning sun, snapping pictures as the building fell away, brick by brick. He hoped to recover a couple of those bricks in honor of his late brother, Donald Bourque, who also started at the station as a cadet and rose to fire chief of the Kensington volunteer department during a 30-year career.

"She was built to last," Bourque said, as the tractor grabbed the steel beam to take another whack at the tower.

There was a feeble attempt to preserve the old station under the process of writing the new 2013 Glenmont Sector Plan, which is designed to bring higher-density development to the 300 acres surrounding the last subway station on the Metro Red Line. Montgomery’s Historic Preservation Commission recommended saving the structure, which was the northernmost county facility when it was built.

But the station was doomed by the state highway paving imperative and the Planning Board denied it historic protection. Now all that will remain of the structure is an original architectural model on display at the county fire and rescue training academy in Rockville.

Station #18 relocated temporarily in April to the Grandview Avenue site of the former Wheaton Fire and Rescue Station, which moved to a new, $14 million station less than a mile south of the Glenmont station. The Wheaton station is 29,000 square feet and includes 7,400 square feet for a community room and kitchen on the upper floor.

The county fire department will take ownership of the new Glenmont station, which allowed it to qualify for $4 million in federal funding.

The county has chosen a colonial design with peaked roof lines for the new Glenmont station, echoing the old one. Planners rejected modern-looking options that featured flat or asymmetrical roof lines.

Plans call for four vehicle bays, which is twice the number of the old facility. The station will sit at the location of the former Glenmont Elementary School, which was leveled as part of the state interchange project.

Hughes Group Architects, based in Sterling, Va., designed both the new Glenmont and Wheaton stations.

Planners endorse Walmart, green office building at ends of Georgia Avenue corridor

By Sonny Goldreich

A pair of major real estate projects at either ends of Silver Spring’s Georgia Avenue corridor—an expansion of United Therapeutic’s downtown headquarters and a Walmart in Aspen Hill—gained momentum from Montgomery County planners this week.

Roughly the same size, they reflect dramatically different development visions. The first was conceived as a vertical high-tech temple to environmentally sensitive design, while the latter promises a horizontal low-price Mecca for lowest common denominator suburban sprawl.

Glass and steel don’t usually exude much warmth, but drug-maker UT’s new 121,724-square-foot office building would generate enough on-site renewable energy to keep it off the power grid. The site plan for the 6-story “net zero” project—which would replace a 3-story public parking garage—has been hailed for its green design that relies on solar and geothermal power for the property, which sits less than half a mile from the Silver Spring Metro station. The Planning Department has recommended approval of the site plan and a July 17 hearing is scheduled for the building, which the Planning Board approved at the project plan stage last year.

montgomeryplanningboard.org/agenda/2014/documents/AspenHill_000.pdf

But the big news comes at the northern end of Silver Spring, where the Planning Board on Thursday (July 10) approved a public hearing draft of an Aspen Hill minor master plan amendment that supports the concept of building a 118,000-square-foot Walmart superstore at a vacant office building site. The board heard Planning Department staff presentation on the amendment and scheduled a public hearing for September 11.

The amendment—pushed by property owner Lee Development Group—would allow construction of the store on the site of the vacant BAE Systems/Vitro office building at 4115 Aspen Hill Road. The 1968 relic sits empty since the military contractor relocated to Rockville in 2010.

Planners agreed with Lee that there is no demand for office space on the 10-acre site, noting that currently “there is roughly 10 million square feet of vacant office space in Montgomery County, and nearly 70 million square feet of vacant space” in the DC metro region.

The planning draft added that the 242,000-square-foot BAE building “accounts for the vast majority of office inventory in Aspen Hill. Consequently, the loss of the building’s sole tenant in 2010 and the owner’s reported inability to release the space has had an outsized impact in Aspen Hill, where the vacancy rate has hovered at around 71 percent. The Vitro vacancy has pushed the vacancy rate in its wider Kensington-Wheaton office submarket to around 25 [percent].”

The empty building, which is west of Georgia Avenue at the intersection of Connecticut Avenue and Aspen Hill Road, is at least two miles from the nearest Metro subway station in Glenmont. But the property sits within easy walking distance of a proposed rapid bus transit station at Georgia and Connecticut, which would seem to support mixed-use retail and residential development.

Despite the location, a planning department market analysis concluded that “additional retail square footage could be supported in the trade area, whereas townhouses may be supported, but their feasibility is less certain at this time.”

So that leaves retail, in this case big box retail. Really big box retail, like the Walmart kind that the County Council failed to block in 2012 after much huffing and puffing to curb so-called category killer stores.

With plans to use 45 percent of the Walmart space for a grocery section, the project has generated intense opposition from the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which represents Giant grocery employees across Aspen Hill Road. Aside from the obvious traffic issues, some opponents also question Walmart’s impact on small specialty retailers (including some in Lee-owned Northgate Plaza across Connecticut Avenue from the BAE building).

The planning draft —which reads in places like it could have been written by a Lee lawyer—helpfully addresses those concerns.

The draft says that “New big-box stores or shopping plazas do not necessarily cause nearby stores to decline. For example, they may enhance the competitiveness of existing stores that sell similar or complementary products by increasing the overall number of customers drawn to the area.”

Regarding grocery stores, the draft notes that “an Aldi supermarket and a forthcoming Wegman’s are adjacent to a Wal-Mart in Germantown.”

And planning staff report that “Big box stores commonly co-locate with other large retailers,” often forming super centers. Within a few blocks, Aspen Hill already has many retailers found in such clusters, such as Kohl’s, Home Depot, Michael’s and Kmart.

All of that suggests that Walmart could co-exist with its retail neighbors rather than cannibalizing them. But Kmart might be the exception, which could result in Aspen Hill trading one big vacant space for another.

The planning draft notes that “While a direct competitor in the discount department store category, the existing Kmart is older, less visible from main streets, and does not sell groceries. Without improvements, K-Mart may experience increased competition and could potentially face significant economic pressures. If a vacancy results, it could be challenging to find a similar tenant.”

Overall, Aspen Hill does not lack for retail services. The planning draft cites “roughly 1.26 million square feet of retail space,” including the nearby strip center cluster at the intersection of Bel Pre and Layhill roads. “Of this amount, around 74,000 square feet (5.8 percent) was vacant as of the end of 2013.” The area is mostly stable, with most of its shopping malls built before 1970 and boasting occupancy rates of between 96 percent and 100 percent.

But one store closure can have a major impact, such as in Plaza del Mercado on Layhill Road, which planners say “accounts for nearly half of Aspen Hill’s vacant retail space,” since a Giant closed in 2011 and dumped 25,000 square feet on the market. The space has been filled recently by discount furniture stores on a month-to-month basis, while nearby residents appeal for a new grocery to move in.

No such questions exist for the United Therapeutic’s project in downtown Silver Spring, which has seen its total office space actually shrink in recent years as property owners tear down old commercial buildings and replace them with new apartment complexes.

montgomeryplanningboard.org Site Plan #820140110

The firm’s new building at 1000 Spring Street would replace a 152-space garage with 111,724 square feet of office and laboratory space, 10,000 square feet of street-level retail and equal parking space. The complex would expand by more than 50 percent UT’s neighboring headquarters campus, which already occupies more than 200,000 square feet after it doubled in size with an expansion completed in 2009

Unlike most of the typical glass boxes in the DC region, the building would add some architectural drama to the southwest corner of Colesville Road and Spring Street. The design looks a bit like a docked ocean liner, featuring an elliptical shape reaching 90 feet high and a prominent prow with mesh ventilation panels.

More dramatic, the building is a rare project that relies entirely on non-carbon power to provide heating, cooling and electricity. Most green-certified properties win brownie points for buying renewable solar or wind capacity on existing power grids that are fueled mostly by environmentally questionable coal, oil, gas, nuclear and hydroelectric power.

A Pain in the Grass/A House on My Back

By Sonny Goldreich

There's a sweet spot in the night sky early in July, when the sun is fully set, the horizon is blanched of color and the moon is climbing high.

That's the moment, away from city lights, when a man can connect with nature, wander about in the growing darkness and peer through the gloom with the penetrating eyes of a hunter-gatherer ancestor.

This is when I finally decided to drag out the mower after three weeks of rain and a lifelong hostility to yard work.

The only thing I could see was a pain in the grass.

If I don't cut it, someone will complain to the county, putting me on the threatened fine list with the house on the street behind ours, the one where the bottom-feeding mortgage servicer's neglect drives down neighboring property values years after the owner who defaulted on his loan died. Someone cuts the grass regularly—once every summer—but the grazing deer take care of most of the trimming.

Hiding behind the clouds, the moon was of little use to light my way and the night sky offered only humidity and the threat of another deluge. Fortunately, the assortment of weeds that I call the lawn had grown to at least 18 inches, so I could feel where I plowed as I dragged my 50-pound, smoke-belching, ear-pounding mower back and forth across my plot of hell.

One advantage of cutting the grass in the dark is that there's no need to avert my gaze from the new neighbors. No need to talk to the guy whose wife is out there every week with her shiny red Toro. No need to talk to the other couple, who recently invested in dozens of plants to spruce up the landscaping left by the previous owners, who grew too old to care or notice.

Is there anything as pointless as a suburban lawn?

It lies there, always growing but never improving, like a sullen 20-something watching internet porn in the basement, whose ambition never extends beyond where to buy some grass. Only the grass in the yard can’t be disposed of in little plastic bags.

Like the teenager, you can try to ignore your yard but it won’t go away. Leave it alone and it will drive you to tears as the pollen invades your sinuses.

And, of course, the neighbors make matters worse. They cut the grass every week, making your lawn look neglected. They use edgers to create little ditches at the curb. They attach the bag to the mower to suck up all the clippings. And they spray weed killer twice a month to eradicate crabgrass and dandelions.

Their every little obsessive lawn care act serves as a rebuke to your sloth.

Worse, they apply stream-killing fertilizer, which blows on your yard and makes your grass grow thicker and faster.

Some neighbors do all this work by themselves, spurred by some recessive agricultural gene. Other neighbors spend a fortune hiring somebody to do all the work, presiding over a small serfdom governed by a monthly service contract.

In the past (or now on PBS shows), a manicured expanse of turf signified the wealth and decadence of French and British landed gentry. Every estate had a crew of gardeners. Some cut the grass. Some pruned the flowers. Some sculpted the bushes. And an army of peasants gathered the clippings and hauled them away.

Once a week, the aristocrats would actually walk their grounds, croquet mallets in hand. Or they would sit under a cupola, ordering where to move human chess pieces.

But in the land of the meritocratic middle class, there is little significance to gentrified greenery, when everyone shares the American dream of owning a home with a front and back yard.

For me, the height of the grass simply measures my lack of interest. The annoyance the yard causes is measured by the number of dead lawn mowers on my front porch.

But in my underwater corner of Silver Spring, a fresh-cut lawn still carries some value by signaling that the homeowners probably still live there and pay their mortgage.

Even so, I take no pride in my yard. I gain no satisfaction in tending my quarter acre. I win no victory in bending nature to my will.

Cutting the grass reminds me of my childhood, when I would take hours—sometimes days—to finish the job. The fact that we bought my parents' home only underscores the ceaseless Sisyphean nightmare.

The horrible reality is that as soon as I finish mowing the lawn, the grass has grown and it's time to cut it again.