» 21 years in the county
» 20,000 graduates through county campus
» Partner or host to 13 biotech companies
Johns Hopkins University has emerged as one of the key players in Montgomery County’s development and health care industries, infusing the county with armies of researchers, doctors and lobbyists.
But some residents wonder if they’re being embraced or smothered.
“They’re everywhere,” said Donna Baron, a North Potomac resident who is taking on the university over its plans for a massive biotechnology center in Gaithersburg. “They have tentacles all over the state.”
Johns Hopkins came to the county with a small satellite campus in the late 1980s. Elaine Amir, executive director of Hopkins’ Montgomery County campus, said the university began to “diversify” about a decade ago and wants to increase its presence all over the county.
“We’re here because we want to serve,” she said. “And that’s why we want to grow. I’d like Montgomery County to be a laboratory for Johns Hopkins.”
It’s certainly growing:
» Earlier this year, the university absorbed Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, giving them direct responsibility for about 15,000 patients per year.
» When some 1,000 Montgomery County families participate in a massive study of child development — that will follow kids from the womb to age 21 — they’ll do so under the eyes of Hopkins’ researchers, who have won a $11 million contract from the federal government, Amir said.
» Hopkins is now host to, or partner of, 13 biotechnology companies or research institutes in Montgomery County. There are four different graduate schools, a for-hire microscopy laboratory and a wet lab.
» The university is also the driving force behind “Science City,” a 60,000-job corporateum proposed for Gaithersburg and the related Corridor Cities Transitway, both of which will be taken up by the county this winter.
“That’s where we’re becoming so visible — because we’re tapping so many people,” Amir said.
The Science City proposal has created the most controversy. A coalition of neighborhood groups, preservationists and self-styled “smart growth” advocates have rallied against the plan, which they say is too much development, too quickly, for a mostly bucolic section of the county. Most of the outrage has centered around Belward Farm, left to the university by Elizabeth Banks in the 1980s. Family members say that the farm was given to Hopkins on the condition that it build a small, “Jeffersonian” campus on the site.
Banks died in 2005. Just three years later, Hopkins unveiled its proposal for Science City, which, if approved, will have 15,000 workers in steel-and-glass behemoths on Belward Farm.
“There was no trust after that,” said Pamela Lindstrom, a longtime leader of the local Sierra Club and an opponent of the scale of Science City. “The residents realized that if they weren’t going to be completely run over, they were going to have to act.”
Montgomery Council Chairman Phil Andrews, who wants to scale back Science City, said Hopkins is generally a good neighbor and he doesn’t think the anger over Science City will last.
“I think any county would like to have a substantial Johns Hopkins presence,” he said. “Johns Hopkins has the right to try and get as much development as is in their interest. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s in the public interest.”
Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, said that Hopkins’ Science City proposal came just as the economy was collapsing and he’s worried that county officials will be bowled over by the massive public relations and lobbying blitz Hopkins has put on.
“They’re asking for an awful lot of money out of the taxpayers in Montgomery and the state,” he said. “What we need here is not PR, but really objective analysis and hard choices about how we grow, and where, in this county.”
