Contributor Opinion By Carl Henn: 3 Redgate Proposals
May 13, 2010 14:33 - 16 Comments
>[This is an edited version; the full piece is available here.]
The City’s “invitation to other potentially interested parties” regarding Redgate closed this morning. It will be interesting to see what comes in. I tried to talk Butler’s Orchard into submitting a proposal to run a pick-your-own orchard on the site, but they chose not to. I thought that the idea, as well as a few related ideas, was worth consideration so submitted a proposal in response to the City’s announcement. It isn’t an offer in the sense that they perhaps meant to request, but I hope it will cause our Mayor and Council to consider these options.
3 Redgate Proposals
Redgate Orchard: Rezone Redgate for agriculture and sell or lease it for operation as an orchard. If operated as a pick-your-own similar to Butler’s Orchard, it wouldn’t be lost as open space to Rockville residents. It would provide good, clean family fun, healthy food and exercise. It would end the $600,000 plus subsidy we now provide to golfing on the property, and either provide an upfront block of money if sold or an income stream if leased.
Redgate is losing money. Rockville’s budget is tight. Our budget is likely to get tighter over the long run. We face continuing cutbacks in State and County support.
The big picture isn’t reassuring. We are now at or near the peak of global oil production. American oil production peaked 40 years ago. Global discoveries peaked in the mid 1960s. We have been burning more than we discover since 1980. Global oil production stopped growing in 2005. . . . Declining oil will mean a declining economy. That will put continued pressure on local government budgets and it will render it likely that Redgate will lose more money as time passes. In addition we face debt challenges and the aging of the baby boomers, which will also burden local finances.
Cities have traditionally been fed by the farms that are adjacent to them. While grain shipments over substantial distances have long historic precedent, it is only quite recently that we’ve replaced local fruits, vegetables and dairy with 1,000 mile supply chains. Long distance sourcing of food is made possible by cheap oil, which will soon disappear. . . . If we sell or lease Redgate for operation as a farm/orchard, we can redirect the money that is currently used to subsidize golfing, as well as using the proceeds from the sale or lease. We need to transition Rockville into a community that uses far less energy. Having additional money will make that transition easier.
Full disclosure: I contacted Butler’s Orchard and encouraged them to respond to this request for information. They considered the idea but chose not to propose such a venture at this time.
Redgate Community Garden: Another possible use of Redgate would be for community gardens. Many towns in Britain have large community gardens at the outskirts. This would provide benefits similar to a Redgate Orchard in recreation, exercise and food, but would likely serve a smaller number of citizens, since it’s easier to drop by to buy produce or do some pick-your-owning than to manage a plot from planting to harvest. This option would also leave the management of the facility in city hands, for better and worse. Establishing the gardens would have initial costs that may rival the subsidy we are providing to golfing. I suspect the long term cost would be lower, and believe the benefits would be greater given my concern about the sustainability of our food production system. Those who golf are a subset of those who eat. This property is a rare opportunity for a very large community garden. Keeping Redgate for individual plots instead of a privately operated orchard would allow the produce to go to families without them needing the cash to buy the produce. This could be a significant benefit to families in a potential future with high unemployment.
It is likely that we don’t have enough demand right now to have community gardens on the whole golf course. One option for the remaining land is to plant it with nut trees. Hardy pecans would take 10 years to begin harvesting, by which point we may be quite happy to have a source of protein and fat that doesn’t need refrigerating. And if worst case scenarios don’t play out, then we can enjoy pecan pies while congratulating ourselves for managing the many challenges that faced us a decade or two ago so well.
Rockville Farm: A different twist on the idea of converting Redgate to a farm or orchard is to put the focus on cultivating kids as well as crops. Some cities have used urban farms as developmental opportunities for children. Here the focus is more on providing rich experiences for our children and less on creating a profitable farm. The City could use the land to create a facility that teaches kids where food comes from, gives them healthy outdoor fun and help them to grow up as well rounded citizens. This model of course doesn’t preclude growing food, but the purpose is recreation and personal development. As such you would expect that it would either mean the City would run it or have a non profit organization run it. We would expect that it would still cost the City money, perhaps even more than what the golf course costs. But it would be a substantially different use than a golf course, perhaps better suited for Rockville’s needs. To get the maximum out of this approach, the City may want to allow farm animals in this facility, which would require a modification of current policy. Keeping Redgate as a City operated facility would allow us to use the land as we see fit, perhaps reserving a portion for a driving range and a few putting greens, devoting part to community gardens and using the rest for a farm to “cultivate kids, crops and animals” to quote the tagline for The Urban Farm in Denver.
A few thoughts about the unsolicited proposals – These would require a sea of parking, paving over an area about the size of Richard Montgomery’s campus. They would have set start and stop times for the events held there, releasing great bursts of traffic out onto already overburdened roads. An orchard, farm or community garden, with an opening and closing time rather than tip off or start time would have a traffic pattern more like the golf course – evenly spread through the day.
So the arena or ball park would create big traffic problems until declining oil undermines their profit model. Then they will fail, leaving us with a sea of pavement surrounded by a golf course that once again needs subsidy to survive.
Redgate golf course needs continuing subsidy to continue to operate. It will likely need an increasingly large subsidy. We should explore other options such as those outlined here.
More broadly, we should rezone the other golf courses in Rockville to allow both their current use and agriculture. Some agricultural uses can coexist with golfing, so that this zoning would provide options to the current managers that may not currently exist. But more importantly it would make it clear what their usage would be if the golf course goes out of business. The current zoning would have the land developed as sprawl housing. This would be a tragic mistake.
We face extraordinary challenges in regards to global warming and peak oil. Local food production will help address both these problems and saving the thousands currently spent to support the golf course could allow us to get through these troubled economic times.
Carl Henn
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Is the site large enough to support all three options? There may or may not be a large enough demand at this time for community garden plots (although I’d LOVE to find a large plot to plant my own corn, as my yard is big enough for corn OR other veggies but not both), and a local orchard and farm would be fantastic, especially if it’s grown with a minimum of pesticides. Could it be a local CSA perhaps, with people paying for shares of the harvest (fruits AND vegetables?) and NOT having to depend on shipments to drop points or driving long distances to rural Montgomery (lovely but further away than I like to do weekly) to collect? Another possibility: Second Chance Wildlife Center is losing their lease soon, if I have heard correctly; might that be a site they could relocate to? Plenty of space there, and centrally located in the County to boot.
Carl, I appreciate the time and effort you have put into the proposals outlined here.I wonder, though, if it would be wise to grow any edible fruits or vegetables on land that was a golf course. I don’t know about this one specifically, but in general, millions of pounds of chemical fertilizers and weed killers are annually applied to golf courses.Those chemicals leach and remain on the soil for years. Before anything bound for human consumption was planted, it would be a good idea to test the soil.
I just read your full piece, Carl, and you did briefly did mention chemical use. I’d still recommend soil and ground-water testing before any farming or planting is considered.
Carl, these ideas are great. The environmental, social, and economic effects of the proposals are fantastic. And the Rockville Farm sounds like so much fun!
Deb – In answer to your question – Do we have enough land for all three options? Redgate is 180 acres. The City currently has around 3 acres of community gardens. So we could triple our community garden space with 6 acres. Given access paths and space for leaves to compost and such, call it 10 acres to provide about 400 garden plots 20 x 25 feet each. Google tells me that the Urban Farm in Stapleton, CO is 23 acres, the 4-H Auer Farm is 120 acres. But the Kirkpatrick 4-H farm is on just one acre with access to 35 more, and the 4-H facility in Hinckley, Ohio is on 4 acres. I think we could have a nice center on ten acres, particularly if its in the part nestled against Rock Creek Park. If you look around and don’t see roads and cars, and if you listen and hear wind in trees rather than traffic on roads, we’ve gone a good way toward creating the sense in the kids that they are in a special place. So we could have an orchard of 160 acres with ten acres of community garden and a ten acre Rockville Farm that is more focused on kids than crops. The average farm in Montgomery County is 130 acres. So, I think the answer is yes, we have room for all three uses. It would even still be over the average size if we keep a ten acre driving range.
Regarding pesticides, I think that produce from land to which no pesticides have been added for three years can be listed as organic (assuming it meets the other criteria such as no non-organic fertilizers or GMO seeds, etc.) I suspect that there is more pesticide applied to golf courses per acre than to orchards. To me that is an argument in favor of making the transition. Pesticides in fish, milk and meat is a greater concern than produce. Pesticide and heavy metals can accumulate in animals as they eat in a manner that doesn’t occur in produce. Fish in particular are a problem since the pesticides wash into the streams on their way to the Bay, and accumulate in the waters and concentrate in the fish, particularly in carnivorous fish. All the more reason to stop putting pesticides on golf courses and to eat more fruit and vegetables.
A couple of weeks ago I was coming back home from Columbia, and I got distracted while driving along East Gude Drive. I ended up on Southlawn Ln, the back route to Redgate, and I was quite surprised at how much undeveloped land there was: it looked like a rural lane, very thickly wooded. When I got home I looked at this area on Google Earth, and I was really surprised at the total acreage of this undeveloped area, of which the golf course itself is a minor portion. Having heard testimony before the Planning Commission about how there is no undeveloped land left in the Rockville area, this was especially surprising.I’m not sure how I believe this land should be utilized; part of me feels that it should be left undeveloped for the time being, rather than trying to quickly assign it to a specific use. I’d like there to remain at least a band of “green space” in the Rockville city limits, but on the other hand I realize that it’s not realistic to allow that much land to remain fallow. As a Summer 2009 veteran of one of Rockville’s urban vegetable gardens (the Wootton’s Mill Park garden), I can well appreciate how wonderful is the opportunity to be an urban/suburban gardener. While I didn’t end up harvesting very much from the lot, mostly because of health problems and the realization that the lot was too large for a single person to handle, I did learn a lot from the experience, and perhaps I could extrapolate a few points from it.First of all, there’s obviously no way that the city could make any money from selling Redgate acreage and converting it to garden plots. I only had to pay slightly less than $50 to rent my plot, and that particular garden only has a couple of hundred plots. The issue then becomes balancing the cost of maintenance of the plots versus the income from renting them. No one could argue that there would be much less cost in maintaining a community garden versus the high maintenance costs of a golf course.There would be significant initial costs in converting wooded acreage to an open area suitable for gardening. Also, there are requirements for parking lots. I recall that, during the height of the gardening season at Wootton’s Mill, the limited parking resulted in quite a bit of frustration for those of us who arrived after 10 AM on a Saturday morning and had to park along the street. This was particularly vexing when carrying gardening tools and things such as mulch, or other large, heavy items.The community garden at Wootton’s Mill was open from April 1 to November 1, meaning that the area was not utilized at all for almost half of the year. This would invite criticism from those who question whether this is the proper way to utilize a limited resource such as urban land.A number of urban garden conversions have had to deal with the problem of pesticide accumulation, and a frequent response is that the land must be “cleansed” of those toxins, usually by growing crops or plants that leach out the chemicals. This delays the ability to quickly convert the land to community gardens or other food crop resources.I am less willing to argue the merits of Mr. Henn’s suggestions, having no personal experience with orchards. However, I do recall the frustration experienced by my stepmother’s family, who owned a farm of a couple of hundred acres near Boyds from the 1940s through the 1990s. They were under relentless pressure all through the 1970s and 1980s from real estate speculators to sell the land for tract development. They wanted to retain the land in some sort of rural context, to help keep the county’s rural character, but after exploring several options, they realized that it was not realistic to experiment with consumer-gardening scenarios, which have not had a successful track record in the county.
Temperance – the open land you see on Southlawn lane is part of the Rock Creek Regional Park, an 1800 acre park that stretches from Gaithersberg to DC. In DC it becomes a national park. I agree that community gardens won’t be a money maker for the city. Indeed, upfront they may cost as much as the golf course is losing. But once started I suspect they wouldn’t be the big money sink that the golf course is becoming. The community gardens that I helped to start are managed by the gardeners and don’t cost the city anything.An orchard could make money for the operator, but the key for us would be that it wouldn’t need a $600,000 annual subsidy and it would be better aligned with our long term needs as we enter the long emergency caused by declining oil production.
Mayor and Council have 2 upcoming agenda items on Redgate. On June 7, this body will hear presentations from the Maryland Stadium Authority and Opening Day Partners on two unsolicited proposals for the Redgate site. On June 14, Mayor and Council will hear about the results of a Request For Information (RFI) process on golf course management options.The unsolicited proposals concern an arena and a minor league baseball park. The RFI process concerns having another entity provide golf course management.On June 14, City Staff is also going to have information on the costs of allowing the course to go back to nature. These are not trivial due to the need to control invasive species.Mark Pierzchala
If i get a vote, it for a mixed use. Community gardens with a “club house” that is a zero energy, passive solar, 150% energy producing, photovoltaic, radient floors that shows how to be very sustainable with little external energy input. Move a branch of the farmers market there. Consult with University of Md to have them locate their Solar Decathlon house there after the 2011 Decathlon.I am sure there are many other ideas for sustainability for the community including an Apiary (bee hives), hoop green houses for fresh veggies for local restaurants/residents most of year.
In my post I should have mentioned that councilmember Bridget Newton requested staff to also bring in an analysis of moving Redgate from an enterprise fund into the general fund. The idea being that it should be considered the same financially as any other recreational facility. Staff agreed to provide this at the June 14 meeting.Mark Pierzchala
These are certainly well thought-out ideas. A golf course sandwiched between the Needwood and Manor courses certainly wasn’t a good use of that land, so alternative ideas are indeed needed. No criticism is intended by that remark, as the chronology of that duplication isn’t apparent. I am concerned about putting in more community garden plots because the Woottons Mill plots have competition from the King Farm Farmstead and the Senior Center plots. Maybe the parking issue brought up can be addressed with a shuttle from town center at a popular time, rather than more paving. Produce from the proposed farm could satisfy the cravings of locavores, especially if Robert’s proposed greenhouse is built. A city-run clubhouse would compete with the Glenview Mansion. Rather than having customers drive out to the farm, a year-round farmers market could be set up in town center, perhaps in the former Super Fresh spot. It may not meet the revenue targeted, but would be a step in the right direction, bring in additional foot traffic, and possibly take traffic off of our conjested Pike. OK, I deviated from the initial point, but these projects can work together…
Regarding parking for community gardens, I would note that cars can park on grass. They do so at Butler’s Orchard, at the Renaissance Festival, at the County Fair and at the Rockville Car Show. I don’t think we would need to provide paved parking beyond that which is already available on the site. Thats good because I don’t see a shuttle as a viable option. The demand would be too low. Community gardens aren’t a big source of travel demand, but people wouldn’t likely take a shuttle given the need to bring flats of seedlings, bags of fertilizer, shovels and such. While I don’t think there would be enough demand to devote 180 acres to community gardens, I wouldn’t worry about having enough demand for a few acres of gardens. The gardens in King Farm have a waiting list, and the demand for gardening space is growing.
Mark PierzchalaIn my post I should have mentioned that councilmember Bridget Newton requested staff to also bring in an analysis of moving Redgate from an enterprise fund into the general fund. The idea being that it should be considered the same financially as any other recreational facility. Staff agreed to provide this at the June 14 meeting.Mark PierzchalaWhat would the impact be of such a move? Would the facility then no longer be considered to be running a deficit?What other ramifications might there be?
Reforesting the majority of the property while setting aside a community garden area might be a afforable alternative that would maintain city control over the land and preserve green space. Perhaps a concrete underpass could be installed under Norbeck Rd. allowing for the Redgate property to be annexed to the John G. Hayes Preserve/Croydon Creek Nature Center on the south side of Norbeck? The underpass could be similar to what is in place under Maryland Ave. (connecting the New Mark Commons neighborhood to Monument Park). Or alternatively, an overpass could be built. Either could be used to extend the existing Hayes Preserve trail network into the Redgate property.
Ramon – Your suggestion has a lot to commend it. If we go that way, I would recommend planting a fair number of walnuts, chestnuts and hardy pecans. That way we wouldn’t have to choose between reforesting the land and getting food production from it. Ten or twenty years down the line we may be quite pleased to have a local food source.