The Greater Sparks-Glencoe Community Council's executive board has asked its membership to support the Highlands office park property as the site for a new Sparks Elementary School if it is found by an independent study to be free of contaminants.
The board has mailed out ballots to its 350 members asking them to vote for one of three options:
* Use of the Highlands site for the school and for 140 to 180 single-family homes;
* Use of the site for residential housing only, in which case another property would have to be found for the Sparks school;
* Commercial and industrial use of the 150-acre site. It is already zoned for that purpose.
The school on Sparks Road burned last month, and its 300 students are in temporary quarters at Catonsville Middle School.
Hico Park Limited Partnership, owner of the Highlands property, has offered to donate 23.7 acres at the southeast corner of its property for the school, contingent on community support and county approval of rezoning the remainder of the land from light industrial-commercial to residential.
Highlands is across Ridgebrook Road and uphill from a 28-acre hazardous-waste site once owned by Bausch & Lomb. That company disposed of chemical wastes in a lagoon drained by dry wells from 1958 to 1975, polluting ground water and soil with heavy metals and trichloroethylene, a toxic compound.
Lee Riley, president of the community group, said the board's support is contingent on the Highland site's being approved by federal, state and local environmental agencies. He said the board was unanimous in support of the Highlands site if it is found to be clean. "It is the best one available," he said.
A Sparks PTA-community association committee will choose a company to perform an independent environmental study on the Highlands property.
"It is a great site, because public water and sewage are available, and its location on York Road is excellent, but we will demand a high threshold of safety," he said.
Ellwood Sinsky, a partner in Hico, said his company would put up a "reasonable" amount of money toward the study. "I have to know more about it to know what is reasonable," he said.
Mr. Sinsky said he had a company test a spring on the property for contaminants last week and that no toxic material was found.
"We don't want a school built there if there is any risk," he said.
Previous testing by state and county agencies has found no toxic material.
In a letter to members of the community group, Mr. Riley said a proposed site on Cold Bottom Road was inadequate because of a lack of public water and sewer, and the narrowness of the road.
He said the current Sparks school property is inadequate because Baltimore County wants to increase enrollment from 300 up to 500 and there is no room for a larger school.
Mr. Riley also said in his letter that a commercial-industrial park would be disastrous to the rural community because it would lead to increased commercial development.