Blegay and Hunter host District 6 town hall on county development plans

A first Sprouts Farmers Market for Prince George’s County gave the District 6 development town hall a concrete example of what residents are being asked to absorb as Westphalia and Largo move through years of planning, delay and revision.

Prince George’s County Council members Wala Blegay and Danielle Hunter hosted the meeting Thursday night at the Westphalia Community Center, 8900 Westphalia Road in Upper Marlboro, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. County officials said the purpose was to update residents on major development projects across District 6 and to hear feedback from people living with the traffic, land-use and infrastructure fallout of that growth.

The most immediate flashpoint is Westphalia Towne Center. The county and development officials say Sprouts Farmers Market will be the first Sprouts in Prince George’s County, taking about 23,000 square feet in a planned 140,000-square-foot retail center. The grocery store is now expected to open in the second half of 2028, but only after customary county approvals. For a community that has waited for promised retail and restaurants, the announcement gives Westphalia a visible marker of progress, but also a reminder of how long the buildout still may take.

Westphalia remains one of the county’s most closely watched growth corridors. The area covers about 6,000 acres west of Upper Marlboro, and Westphalia Town Center is described as a 480-acre master-planned mixed-use community along Maryland Route 4. The county planning department has said the 2007 Westphalia Sector Plan originally imagined the area as a Regional Center, with the possibility of eventually becoming a Metropolitan Center. Plan Prince George’s 2035 later reclassified it as a Local Town Center, lowering expected density and assuming no imminent fixed-guideway transit service.

That long reset matters because the county council in January 2026 repealed the effort to write a major amendment to the 2007 Westphalia sector plan. Officials said more public and stakeholder engagement was needed, along with more time to work through infrastructure financing issues. In practical terms, that means the same questions that have shadowed Westphalia for years remain open: what gets built, who pays for roads and utilities, and how quickly the promises become actual places.

Largo Town Center also stayed on the agenda. Already a hub for government and medical services, Largo has been a focus of repeated planning efforts tied to the Blue Line Corridor and the county’s Health Sciences District. The Largo Town Center Development Board was created to carry out the 2013 sector plan and sectional map amendment, including the idea of a new regional medical campus as a major public health institution.

Taken together, the town hall underscored a familiar Prince George’s County tension: residents are not only being asked to welcome growth, but to decide how much traffic, change and unfinished infrastructure they are willing to live with before the next approvals harden into reality.