Letter From Bill Mackey of DPZ

Dear Residents,

Your community on the Clarksville Pike is truly awesome! The County’s consultant team from the Design Collective, Inc. is now preparing a first draft of design guidelines for the Clarksville-River Hill Route 108 corridor based upon your ideas and input from the February 12 community meeting. It is thrilling to see how many people participated by sharing their hopes and visions of the future for their community.

At the meeting, people commented on every aspect of the initiative. Many mentioned the need for a continuous connection along the entire  corridor for both pedestrians and cyclists and better ways to cross 108 and 32 while smoothing traffic flow. Others asked for gathering places and useful street furnishings such as bike racks and improved signage visibility and compatibility.

Many community members wanted more naturalistic landscaping for an informal, rural, and environmentally thoughtful setting. People expressed interest in seeing a variety of different building façades along the corridor similar to a more traditional main street, except without visible parking in front of buildings and, especially, without parking on the street itself. A mixture of contemporary and traditional architecture, perhaps focused on rural forms but with more modern materials, seemed to be the direction many people thought might best suit the area.

As the designers work to distill the expressed desires of the community and create a design document, their goal is to address the uniqueness of this very special place where town meets country. The design team will put into pictures and text what this idea could look like for Clarksville Pike.

The process has begun and that work will be the subject of another community meeting near the end of April or beginning of May. We’ll send you more information when the first draft is ready, and we look forward to the creation of something special and unique for this community and to hearing from you about whether we got it right!

Bill Mackey, AICP
Chief of Comprehensive and Community Planning
Howard County Department of Planning and Zoning
wmackey@howardcountymd.gov
410-313-4321