The County Votes Tuesday on a 30-Year Solar Lease at Gude Landfill. Nobody Has Said Whether It Is Market Rate.

The Montgomery County Council votes Tuesday afternoon on handing a solar developer 20 acres of the capped Gude Landfill in Rockville for the next 30 years. The public hearing and the vote are the same agenda item, set for 1:30 p.m.

The terms are straightforward. Community Power Group LLC, a company based in Chevy Chase, would finance, design, build, own and operate a 5-megawatt solar array on county-owned land. The county would collect $5,000 per acre per year, rising 1.25 percent annually. That is $100,000 in year one, an average of $120,430 a year, and about $3.6 million across the full term.

What the Council’s packet never says is whether that is a fair price.

The solar is not the argument

It would be easy to read this as a park being paved over. It is not.

Gude took household trash from 1964 until 1982. In 2013 the Maryland Department of the Environment issued a consent order directing the county to clean it up, and the remediation that followed, in the county’s own words, “included a passive land reuse component, which required the County to install passive land reuse amenities and a renewable energy source on top of the landfill after the remediation work was completed.”

The 2019 Gude Landfill Passive Recreational Land Use Master Plan did both. It lays out park amenities and, separately, “dedicates at least 20 acres for a renewable energy source.” The array going before the Council on Tuesday is that renewable component, on the acreage set aside for exactly this purpose. Putting solar on a closed landfill the county already owns is the sort of thing a county is supposed to do.

What the county’s own rules ask for

Before the county can dispose of land it owns, including by long-term lease, the Council has to approve a Declaration of No Further Need. The procedure is set out in county regulation, and it is specific about value.

The regulation defines “Full Market Value” as fair market value under the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice, and requires a professional appraisal “in the case of a sale.” This is a lease, so no appraisal was required. For leases the regulation asks instead for “market studies, that the Executive relied on or will rely on in determining the real property’s or the lease’s or license’s Full Market Value.”

It also says this, at section 11B.45.01.09: “The Executive must also advise the Council whether the proposed Disposition will be for less than Full Market Value.”

That advice does not appear anywhere in the 10-page packet. Neither does a market study. The County Executive’s September 8 transmittal does not address it, the July 1 memo setting out the material terms does not, Executive Order 110-26 does not, and the draft resolution the Council will vote on does not.

What the packet says instead is that the question was set aside: “An appraisal for the property was not completed, as the value of the land does not correlate with the intended use. Pricing for the lease was established competitively and based on the pricing received during the Authority’s Request for Expressions of Interest process.”

In other words, the price came out of a solicitation rather than a valuation. That may well be a reasonable way to price a capped landfill, which is not ordinary real estate. But the regulation treats the competitive process and the market-value determination as two different things, and only one of them is in the file.

None of this is a violation. The same regulation allows the county to dispose of property for less than full market value as long as the Council approves it. The point of telling the Council whether a deal is below market is so that when it votes, it knows which kind of vote it is casting.

The Council’s own legislative analyst flagged the gap in the staff report, writing that “as there is no appraisal, the Council must expressly waive the disposition regulation’s requirements for an appraisal to establish full or fair market value through its action resolution.” The resolution in the packet does not contain that waiver. Its background section notes that no appraisal was done; its action section approves the declaration and says nothing further. Whether the resolution gets amended on the dais Tuesday is worth watching.

Who gets the electricity

Residents may assume a solar field on county land powers county buildings. Under this lease it does not, at least not automatically. The packet puts it plainly: “One hundred percent of the electricity generated by the solar project will be available to Community Power Group LLC customers through the local electric utility, including Montgomery County, if the County chooses to become a customer.”

The county is the landlord. Whether it ends up buying any of the power is a separate decision it has not made.

That is a different structure from the county’s other landfill solar project, at the closed Oaks Landfill in Gaithersburg, where a 6-megawatt system generates about 11.4 million kilowatt hours a year. Ameresco, which built that one, says one of its three arrays serves the county under a power purchase agreement while the other two are community solar reserved entirely for low- and moderate-income subscribers. The Gude packet describes no county power purchase agreement and sets out no low-income commitment.

What the packet does not cover

Gude’s 92-acre capped footprint sits under an engineered cap built to satisfy a state consent order. The 20 acres being leased are inside that footprint. The packet does not discuss how the cap is protected during construction, who is responsible for it over three decades, or whether the Maryland Department of the Environment has signed off on building on it. Those are not rhetorical questions. They are simply absent from the documents the Council has.

The park is the other open thread. The master plan pairs the renewable component with trails, a dog area, nature play and a disc golf course. The solar lease is moving now. There is no published opening date for any of the park amenities.

Tuesday

The item is listed as a public hearing and action, with a vote expected the same afternoon, and it goes straight to the full Council without a committee review. That is the normal posture for these disposition items, not a sign of haste. The county also gave the Council more than the required 30 days to comment, and under the regulation the declaration would have been automatically approved in early November if the Council had simply let the clock run. It chose to hold a hearing instead.

Three questions are worth putting to the county and are not answered in the file: whether the Council was advised, in any form, that this lease is or is not below full market value; how many firms responded to the solicitation and what rents they offered; and who carries responsibility for the landfill cap over the life of the lease. We will follow up after the vote.

The hearing is at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, October 13, in the Council Hearing Room at 100 Maryland Avenue in Rockville, and is streamed on the Council’s website. The full agenda and the staff packet are public.

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