Ground Broken On New Silver Spring Venue

By Matt Bush

In Maryland, Montgomery County leaders broke ground on a new 2,000-seat concert venue in Silver Spring. The Fillmore Silver Spring, inspired by the famous namesake venue in San Francisco, is scheduled to open a year from now.

It has long been in the planning stages, and will cost more than $11 million. When it was first planned, the price tag was $8 million. Montgomery County will pick up the additional costs, which county executive Isiah Leggett would not term an "overrun."

"When you look at the project originally, it was six years ago when we first had the original estimate. And we didn't have the final design. The cost of the construction did not go up. We're still going to do it at $8 million. What has happened has been some regulatory changes, environmental sediment and other things that have happened, and the delay," he says.

Leggett says the venue will serve an area of Silver Spring, east of Colesville Road, that has not seen the massive redevelopment other areas of Silver Spring have.