Walk from the Olympia Cafe to Brookville Market, a few doors down on the same block, and you'll pass under a tree canopy the Village of Martin's Additions has been rebuilding for years, along a street the Village itself does not control. That contradiction is easy to miss if you live here. The trees, the street cleaning, the leaf pickup, all of it runs through Village contracts with names attached. The sidewalk under your feet on Brookville Road answers to Annapolis first.

That gap between what this tiny municipality runs and what it merely petitions for is the reason a sidewalk project residents have wanted since at least 2020 only broke ground this spring, and why the Village turned an ordinary council election into something closer to a block party to mark the wait finally ending.

Everything Else Here Has a Name Attached

Martin's Additions is 328 homes and just over 1,000 residents, governed by five elected council members and a small paid staff led by Village Manager Michael Silliman. For a place this size, an unusual amount of daily infrastructure is handled in-house, by name.

Rolling Acres Landscaping, run by Tucker Hyman, does the Village's street cleaning, leaf vacuuming, and snow removal. GreenSweep, run by Shane Green, maintains the plantings at spots like the corner of Cummings Lane and Brookville Road. Hughes Landscaping, led by John Hughes, handles sidewalk repair and pothole filling on Village streets. Pepco keeps the Village's 74 outdoor streetlights running, and a switch to LED fixtures seven years ago cut the lighting bill by more than 70 percent.

None of that applies to the sidewalk along Brookville Road itself, because Brookville Road is Maryland Route 186, the state highway that runs along the village's western edge. No state highway serves the interior of Martin's Additions directly, but this one defines its border and carries its foot traffic. Fixing the sidewalk in front of Brookville Market or Olympia Cafe meant going through the Maryland State Highway Administration, not the Village's usual contractors.

That last line is the whole story.

Five Years Between the Recommendation and the Cones

The push for a better sidewalk on Brookville Road traces back to the Village's 2020-21 Walkability Task Force, which flagged the corridor for pedestrian safety and ADA improvements. The Village has been pursuing the fix for more than six years since.

Getting there meant working through a state permitting process rather than a Village work order. The project runs under SHA Permit No. MO-0565-25-DO, covering the stretch of MD-186 from Turner Lane to Quincy Street, with ADA ramp replacement, sidewalk repair and replacement, curb and drainage work, and utility relocation all bundled into one contract. The Notice of Award was intended for September 19, 2025, with the contract requiring the work finished by April 3, 2026.

Actual construction began later and block by block. The first section to go, block 5 running from Quincy Street to Bradley Lane, started April 13. The Village has said it will schedule a ribbon-cutting in July 2026 once the full project wraps.

Building It One Block, One Root, at a Time

Once the state permit cleared, the Village ran the project the way it runs everything else, in plain language, one update at a time. Residents get weekly communications during construction covering status, timeline, and the coming week's work. No construction vehicles sit on Village streets overnight. Parking on adjacent side streets is reserved block by block for work crews, and Silliman himself is the day-to-day project manager, with the contractor's site supervisor and the Village's engineers on call.

The plans account for the same canopy the Village has spent years cultivating. Only a few trees line this stretch of sidewalk, and the contract calls for hand excavation around their roots rather than machine digging, protecting a resource the Village treats as seriously as the pavement itself.

The Canopy Overhead Isn't an Accident Either

That root protection detail makes more sense once you know what else the Village has been building alongside the sidewalk. Martin's Additions was recognized by the Arbor Day Foundation as a Tree City for the 17th consecutive year in fiscal 2026, a streak overseen by Volunteer Tree Supervisor Paula Goldberg and funded through a $40,000 tree maintenance budget and a separate $35,000 planting budget.

The native tree planting program put 21 trees in the ground in fiscal 2026 alone, part of a run that has added several hundred trees to the Village since the program launched. Village crews also completed 37 tree maintenance orders over the same year. Each April the Village marks the milestone with an Arbor Day event, this year a Forest Meditation held in Chevy Chase Local Park.

Seventeen years of consistent tree investment is why a sidewalk contractor has to hand-dig around roots instead of trenching through them. The two projects, one on the ground and one overhead, were never really separate.

An Election Day That Doubled as a Sidewalk Party

The Village found its own way to mark the sidewalk's progress: it folded the celebration into an election. On May 5, 2026, residents brought completed ballots to a secure drop box set up at what the Village called its Election Day Sidewalk Celebration. That day, 130 voters delivered ballots in person and another 139 returned theirs by mail.

Turnout for the contested race, five residents running for three open council seats, hit 42 percent, a jump from the 28.5 percent turnout in the prior year's uncontested election. The winning candidates, Jeff Blander, Arthur Alexander, and John Zachary, began their two-year terms on July 1.

Pairing a ballot drop-off with a sidewalk milestone is a small move, but it tells you something about how this Village operates. Civic participation and physical infrastructure aren't treated as separate calendars here. They're the same event.

Where the New Sidewalk Actually Leads

None of this matters much in the abstract. It matters because of what sits at either end of the stretch getting rebuilt.

Brookville Market has been a family-run grocery on Brookville Road for more than 50 years, staffed by a team of ten who restock produce, baked goods, and deli items daily and run a rotating hot bar that includes grilled salmon and chicken salad alongside soups and sandwiches made in-house. A short walk away, Olympia Cafe has held onto its counter-service, order-at-the-register format and a run of orange stools that regulars describe as a throwback to an earlier decade, the kind of place that's open by 6:30 on a weekday morning before most of the Village is awake.

The sidewalk connecting them was never a Village asset the way the trees or the streetlights are. It took a state permit, a contractor's schedule, and six years of patience to get fixed, and the Village marked its arrival the same way it marks everything else: out loud, in public, with residents standing on it.

For anyone weighing a move into a place this size, Dana Rice Group spends its time in exactly these details, the ones that don't show up on a listing sheet but shape what daily life actually feels like on a specific block. If Martin's Additions or another close-in Chevy Chase neighborhood is on your list, reach out and we'll walk you through what makes each one different, block by block.