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POOLESVILLE, Md. – McDonald’s franchise owner told town commissioners Monday night that his restaurant has become a daily scene of drug use, property destruction, and threats against employees — and that a serious incident is imminent.

“We are just a day away from a horrific accident happening,” Brian Cleghorn, who has owned the Poolesville McDonald’s since 1991, told commissioners at the May 18 meeting. “The kids are out of control and have a complete disregard for authority or respect for property.”

Cleghorn said the restaurant — which he called the most costly of his seven locations for property destruction — faces chronic damage year after year, far exceeding anything at his restaurants in Germantown, Gaithersburg, and Frederick. “What’s most important to me and what concerns me the most,” he said, “is the safety and security of my employees and my customers.”

MONTPELIER, Vt. — The Design Review Committee voted 5-0 Monday night to approve exterior designs for two three-story affordable housing buildings proposed for Northfield Street, sending both applications to the Development Review Board with five design options that could reshape how the buildings look before a shovel breaks ground.

The vote caps a two-meeting review process that forced the applicant back to the drawing board on materials, rooflines, colors, and columns — and exposed anxieties about a hillside that a neighboring property owner said was once a dump.

MONTPELIER, Vt. — A malfunctioning sprinkler system forced the abrupt evacuation of a Montpelier Development Review Board meeting Monday night, leaving two major affordable housing hearings unresolved and sending board members, applicants, and residents out the door mid-deliberation.

“We cannot stay in the building,” Zoning Administrator Meredith Crandall announced as alarms triggered the shutdown. “The sprinkler system is not working.”

Both hearings for proposed residential buildings at 48 Northfield Street and 68 Northfield Street — the latter not yet formally opened — were continued to June 1st.

MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Md - The Montgomery County Council’s Advisory Commission on Policing met on May 11th and exposed a sharp discrepancy between what State’s Attorney John McCarthy is saying about guns recovered by police and what Montgomery County Police Department’s own mandatory reporting shows.

GAITHERSBURG, Md. — A light City Council agenda, and a short meeting carried a lot business before the Gaithersburg Mayor and City Council on Monday evening, as members approved nearly $900,000 in social services funding, authorized a roughly $1.5 million generator replacement at city facilities, and heard a detailed briefing on the federal Opportunity Zones 2.0 program — from the rubble of Lakeforest Mall already emerging as the city’s most obvious candidate.

The meeting, which opened with Council Member Jim McNulty absent, moved through all votes at 4-0.

Council President Fani-González said having three councilors running to be the next county executive made things more challenging. "Everybody wants to take credit on things."

The hard part is yet to come, Fani-González said that they way Montgomery County is being run is unsustainable.

The Montgomery County Public Schools Policy Management Committee voted to recommend rescinding Policy JEF, the district’s nearly 50-year-old open lunch policy, and forwarded the matter to the full Board of Education for action at its May 21st business meeting.

MONTPELIER, Vt. — The City Council voted 4-1 Wednesday night to raise water and sewer rates by 4.3 percent effective July 1 — the latest in a decade-long series of annual hikes — as city engineers unveiled roughly $60 million in infrastructure projects and lawmakers clashed over whether the city is doing enough, too little, or simply everything wrong when it comes to its growing unhoused population.

The May 13th meeting ran past 10 p.m., touching a river hazard zoning amendment, a contested board reappointment, a two-hour infrastructure briefing that made plain the scale of what lies beneath Montpelier’s streets, and a procedural fight over homelessness that ended before it began.

GAITHERSBURG, Md. — Gaithersburg committed to a $36.1 million renovation of 8 and 12 South Summit Avenue to replace its current City Hall — a cost that has grown 54 percent from the project’s $23.5 million authorization — and construction has not yet begun. The Mayor and City Council approved that figure unanimously on May 4, 2026.

That commitment came as the city was still closing out the financial fallout from its previous civic construction project: a decade-long, $28.4 million conversion of a commercial office building into a new police station that ended in a secret contractor settlement and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees charged to city taxpayers.

MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Md. — County Executive Mark Elrich used his weekly address to launch a multi-front attack on the county council’s budget approach, warning that the council’s plan will leave homeowners paying more, create structural deficits for years to come, and saddle his successor with “an enormous problem.”

MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Md. — The County Council voted 6 to 5 on Wednesday to scrap the county’s decades-old flat income tax and replace it with a three-bracket progressive structure — a vote its supporters called a generational shift in how the county taxes its residents and its opponents called a damaging blow to working households already squeezed by inflation, rising gas prices, and federal job losses.

MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Md. — The County Council voted on Tuesday to halt new data center construction for two years, corrected gun legislation invalidated by a Maryland Supreme Court ruling, and confronted a rising tide of racist attacks against elected officials.

MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Md. — Montgomery County’s Infrastructure Funding Workgroup is heading toward a June 30, 2026 deadline to answer a question that touches every resident’s wallet: how should the county pay for crumbling roads, overcrowded schools, and aging parks — and who should bear that cost?

MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Md. — On Monday, amid growing environmental and affordability concerns, Montgomery County Councilmember Evan Glass introduced legislation to pause permits for data centers. The proposed legislation, if passed, would halt the issuance of any permits for data center construction for six months in Montgomery County.

GAITHERSBURG, Md. — Montgomery County’s tourism marketing organization told Gaithersburg’s Mayor and City Council Monday that hotel tax collections in the city fell 8 percent through the first six months of fiscal year 2026, as federal workforce changes and spending cutbacks ripple through the regional lodging market — though the agency’s president said preliminary spring data may signal the worst has passed.

MONTPELIER, Vt. — The Montpelier-Roxbury school board approved its third-quarter financial report on May 6th with the district approximately $400,000 ahead of revenue projections, while also receiving its first multi-year financial forecast projecting roughly five percent annual growth in major budget categories through fiscal year 2028.

GAITHERSBURG, Md. — A white ghost bike installed at the Gaithersburg intersection where 61-year-old Zhen Xiu Chen was struck and killed by a trash truck in 2022 has since been destroyed - crushed.

GAITHERSBURG, Md. — A 15-year analysis of adopted budgets and audited financial statements reveals a city that has dramatically expanded its capital investment, built record reserves, diversified its revenue base, and kept its tax rate unchanged since a single recession-era increase — while now watching federal layoffs threaten the income-tax growth that fueled its most prosperous decade.

POOLESVILLE, Md. — The Poolesville Town Commissioners voted unanimously Monday to adopt a solar energy ordinance that gives the town a formal voice in any future application to site a solar generating station or battery storage facility within town limits — and set local standards that go beyond what state law requires.

The Poolesville Parks Board spent the bulk of its May 6th meeting on a growing public safety problem: minors riding motorized scooters, e-bikes, and gas-powered bikes through town streets, sidewalks, and trails, with little apparent regard for traffic laws or helmets.