Silver Spring

SILVER SPRING -- Delegates representing 100,000 Southern Baptists in Maryland and Delaware passed strong resolutions yesterday condemning homosexuality and abortion.In one of the resolutions, the delegates, called messengers, were responding to controversy over a Baptist Church ceremony this spring in North Carolina blessing a same-sex union.As a result of that ceremony, the church where it occurred was removed from membership in the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest Protestant denomination.

FIRST CAME SHOCK: News on a snowy Friday night that a passenger train had become a fireball in a collision in Silver Spring. Then sorrow: Details of the victims who perished in that tinderbox, including eight young people striving to remake their lives in a Job Corps program and three railroad veterans with iron-clad work records: Richard Orr of Glen Burnie, James E. Major Jr. of Linthicum and James Quillen of Frederick.Next comes questions: Why did Maryland Rail Commuter train No. 286, en route to Washington, D.C., from West Virginia, collide with Amtrak's Capitol Limited bound for Chicago?

SILVER SPRING -- At the intersection of Georgia Avenue and Colesville Road, an art deco shopping center once represented the dream of families who longed for an idyllic life outside the concrete cities.Built in 1938, the Silver Spring Shopping Center was a novelty. It featured a cluster of stores surrounding a parking lot -- Maryland's first car-oriented strip shopping.Today, that intersection could become a major crossroads for Montgomery County and, perhaps, for Maryland. While the stores sit empty, the shopping center rests on the corner of what could soon become a new "American Dream" -- the label a Canadian developer has given a proposed megamall here.

HOWARD COUNTY residents can hop an additional daily bus from Columbia to the Silver Spring Metrorail station beginning today.It's part of a state effort to help those in Howard get to Washington, says Mass Transit Administration chief Ronald L. Freeland.The bus will leave Columbia at noon and arrive at the Silver Spring Metro station at 1: 05 p.m. It will depart from the Metro station for Columbia at 1: 10 p.m. The trip is an expansion of bus line No. 929, which offers Columbia commuters express trips to the Metro station, where riders can catch Metrorail's Red Line to Washington or Shady Grove.

SILVER SPRING -- Pigs are flying. Hell has frozen over. Silver Spring is getting a new downtown.After two decades of fits and starts that included visions of a monorail and wave pool and plans that nearly tore the community apart, officials will break ground tomorrow on a $321 million town center.The project will bring high-tech movie theaters, name-brand stores and civic boasting rights to a community that as recently as last month was used as a seedy backdrop for a political TV spot.The Silver Spring Town Center has spawned $500 million worth of development nearby, such as the $150 million Discovery channel headquarters, the American Film Institute's East Coast center, an expansion of Montgomery College and a multimillion-dollar transit center.

The Maryland Transit Administration's mid-day, late-night and Saturday bus service between Columbia and Silver Spring will discontinue June 1 -- despite objections from riders about the absence of a public hearing on the decision."

Comcast Corp., the area's dominant cable television company, said yesterday that it will hire 250 people -- maybe more -- as part of its plan to move into a new regional headquarters in Silver Spring. The hiring will consist mainly of customer-service positions. The offices will include a national call center for Comcast's high-speed Internet service. They will also house the headquarters for Comcast's operations in the Washington metropolitan area and Northern Virginia. The Philadelphia-based company has been aggressively buying up cable properties throughout the mid-Atlantic region, and several of its newest properties would fall within the Silver Spring center's jurisdiction, which contains 350,000 subscribers.

MONTGOMERY COUNTY Executive Douglas M. Duncan's endorsement of the planned $500 million American Dream retail and entertainment complex in downtown Silver Spring edges that ambitious 28-acre project closer to realization. Many hurdles remain, though, and opponents still regard the megamall as a nightmare.Baltimoreans often view Montgomery County as this rich D.C. suburb whose concerns are far removed from ours. This is true -- and false. A look at two of its key urban cores, Rockville and Silver Spring, shows that neither has been immune to the decay and abandonment seen in downtown shopping districts in aging big cities.

ROCKVILLE -- Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan announced yesterday that he has terminated an agreement with a Canadian developer to build American Dream, a sprawling $585 million retail and entertainment complex in Silver Spring.Duncan said his decision was based on the uncertainties surrounding the project's finances. Triple Five Development's executives failed to produce "concrete evidence" of private investors willing to put their money into a project, he said.But even if the developer could document private backing, he said, the project relied too much on taxpayer support -- up to half its cost, or about $250 million to $300 million.

LACKING POLITICAL WILL. Anti-business. Shortsighted. That's how critics described Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan's decision to pull the plug on the American Dream Mall.His action was none of those things. Mr. Duncan showed courage in severing ties on a $585 million project that could have energized Silver Spring, made his county a major tourism magnet and probably burnished his image as a can-do executive should he seek higher office.Mr. Duncan had been uneasy that the developer, Triple Five Group, seemed to be spending more time soliciting government aid than in securing private support for its huge shopping HTC complex, complete with hotel, giant wave pool and IMAX theater.