Route 1 Reporter (https://route1reporter.com/page/2/)
Dozens of ear-witnesses in College Park, Greenbelt and Berwyn Heights, including this journalist, reported hearing a loud, explosion-like boom in the early-morning hours of Sunday, Aug. 18, 2019. The noise rattled residents, who took to social media to report their experiences. As of Sunday evening, no definitive cause for the noise has been disclosed by local officials.
At its Aug. 13, 2019, meeting, College Park City Council approved a measure authorizing city staff to borrow approximately $14 million in city funds to build a new City Hall that will also share space with University of Maryland offices, as well as approximately $5 million to fund new athletic fields for Duvall Field, the city’s largest public park. In so doing, College Park City Council rejected calls from a vocal group of residents to put the matter before voters as a referendum in the city’s upcoming November municipal elections.
The Maryland State Highway Administration is currently in the process of re-designing the surface of Queens Chapel Road in Prince George’s County. The bad news: it doesn’t go far enough to enhance pedestrian or cyclist safety.
Mount Rainier City Council gathered in a special worksession last night to hash out a funding strategy for two major projects, one a renovation of a city-owned building long-dreamed to serve as a community center, the other a project to develop a public plaza on the 3300 block of Rhode Island Avenue.
Mount Rainier City Police Department is asking for anyone with information on two separate incidents — a shooting that left one dead and a hit-and-run that critically injured a woman and her child — that occurred over the past week.
Elections in Prince George’s County’s southern Route 1 corridor tend to be small and fast affairs, with short campaign seasons that are active for maybe a month. But in College Park, the largest city along Baltimore Avenue inside the Beltway, the 2019 campaign is already underway, months before voters go to the polls in early November.
For those used to the pace of a national election cycle, a few months on the local campaign trail might seem like peanuts. But for Maryland’s middling-sized municipalities, shorter elections are the norm. Consider that Hyattsville had a fully-competitive slate of 13 candidates running for five council seats and the mayor’s office, and of those, only one announced their campaign more than six weeks out. In Mount Rainier, the candidate registration and certification deadline is three weeks from election day.
In College Park, candidates can begin to circulate a petition for candidacy in August.
The design of College Park’s proposed City Hall continues to take shape while, on a parallel track, City Council considers taking out millions in loans to pay for the new facility – and a new Duvall field, too.
It’s finally happening: Purple Line construction will begin to make serious inroads into the Route 1 corridor later this month in College Park, city officials announced July 9. Two lanes will be closed initially on Campus Drive.
It’s worse than we thought. 166 pedestrians have been killed by motorists in 163 crashes on Prince George’s County roads since January 2010.
Plans to demolish and redevelop Hyattsville’s abandoned WSSC headquarters could be upturned as city officials pursue an appeal of the District Council’s vote to authorize a rezoning of the property and approve a conceptual redevelopment plan.
Scooters and e-bikes are on the horizon for College Park.
Two major Route 1-corridor redevelopment projects will go before the Prince George’s County Planning Board in late July.
Actually, make that 5,520 units in the development pipeline in the Route 1 corridor.
The total number of declared new residential units in the development pipeline now exceeds 5,500.