Oct. 15, McDonald’s withdrew a plan to build a restaurant on East-West Highway and Ager Road, according to a letter obtained by the Hyattsville Life & Times.
Since January, the county planning board has recommended a McDonald’s on the site twice, and the county council has twice discussed the recommendation without endorsing it.
In a meeting Oct. 6, County Council Member Sydney J. Harrison (District 9) said that 56% of Prince George’s businesses are fast food restaurants, and 1 in 4 deaths in the county come from a heart attack. “We don’t need this,” he said. “We just don’t.
In April, the county council asked McDonald’s and the planning board to address traffic congestion, pedestrian and cyclist safety, public health and recognition of the Green Hill Plantation site where people were enslaved.
At the District Council meeting Oct. 6, several council members and local residents expressed their disappointment with the response.
“I don’t think the planning board adequately addressed many of the remand points,” said Council Member Eric Olson (District 3). “There are a lot of remaining concerns.”
The health impact assessment, requested in the remand order and completed by the health department, was inadequate and vague, according to People’s Zoning Counsel Stan Brown. Brown said that the assessment was deemed inadequate at the previous hearing, and that it still is.
Rachel Mulford, one of several parents attending the hearing whose children attend the César Chávez Dual Spanish Immersion School which lies within one-third of a mile from the site, said that parents want to believe that the county’s zoning ordinance is meant to protect residents. “But how can it if the HIA [health impact assessment] can be so cursory?” she asked.
Attorney Edward Gibbs, representing McDonald’s, repeated numerous times throughout the Oct. 6 hearing that while he respected the opposition’s concerns, they shouldn’t have been relevant this late in the planning process.