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The air is hot and thick with the smoke of Canadian forest fires, but the county workforce just keeps on delivering.
Yesterday, we celebrated the completion of the Crownsville Hospital Memorial Park water project with a Turn On Ceremony. We knew that the Crownsville infrastructure was crumbling when we took ownership of the property from the state, and that’s why we asked for and received over $30 million in state funding the next year. That’s the money that is paying to lay the groundwork - or underground work - that it will take to restore the buildings and implement the Master Plan that our residents envisioned. This project was completed in eight months. Well done, DPW and Central Services.
We also owe a thank you to Inspections and Permits, Fire, Police, and Office of Emergency Management for their quick and decisive response to the partial collapse of the parking garage beneath the ten-story, privately-owned Empire Towers in Glen Burnie.
Unpermitted work had impacted essential components of the structure, and our first responders and inspectors quickly determined that evacuation was necessary to protect lives. The building owner has hired a structural engineering firm to repair the damage and prevent further collapse, and our team at Anne Arundel Economic Development Corporation has stood up a grant program to assist the impacted businesses. Updates are at aacounty.org/empiretowers.
Our County Council has also been delivering, and this week I was able to sign two very impactful bills that they passed at the last meeting: codification of our green notices, and modernization of our agricultural preservation program. Both were the result of many months of research and planning by county staff, both passed in their first hearing without amendments, and both passed without opposition.
The Agricultural and Woodland Preservation Program was created in the 1990s under County Executive Janet Owens - with a lot of input from my father. Alongside two state programs, it’s protected 14,900 acres of privately owned land in our country through purchased easements.
Once an easement is placed on the land, it must remain in agricultural or forest use, not only under its current ownership, but also for future buyers. That means that our residents get the health benefits of open space and locally grown farm products, avoid the public infrastructure and service costs of development, and are able to purchase farmland at reduced prices.
Program participation, however, had declined in recent years, and the staff at Planning and Zoning found out from farmers why. It had to do with eligibility, compensation, tax benefits, and timing. They took the feedback, shared it with stakeholders, drafted legislation to fix it (Bill 55-26), and took it to the Council. Farmers showed up and spoke for themselves, councilmembers got it, the bill sailed through, and we signed it at the preserved Hopkins Family Farm in Lothian under a massive oak on a hill overlooking some of the most beautiful pasture in the county.
The other bill (Bill 53-26) didn’t change much, but it put into county code what our administration had voluntarily implemented early in my first term.
Before I took office, county reviewers were in the habit of passing out modifications - the fancy term for waivers - to our environmental laws far too often. Waiving public meetings, forest conservation restrictions, wetlands protections, specimen tree protections, steep slope protections, and floodplain restrictions became standard practice.
After taking office in 2018, I hired an Environmental Policy Director, Matt Johnston, and he worked with our land use agencies to not only change the practices, but to put updated standards in writing so that residents and developers would know what to expect. We called them Green Notices, and we enforced them.
We also, under Matt’s leadership, created a Green Infrastructure Master Plan that was approved by the County Council in 2022. It maps our most valuable environmental assets and sets forth the methods by which we protect them, including enforcement of our environmental laws.
In one of my monthly meetings last year with our current environmental policy advisor, Erik Michelsen, we discussed strategies to prevent future administrations from returning to the old approach. Erik went to work with stakeholders on a bill that would codify the Green Notices relating to environmental modifications. I thought it would meet resistance, but it did not. We signed it in a celebratory ceremony this week, and I’m so glad we did. Here’s why.
I learned this week from some residents about a development application called Brandon Shores, on a 324-acre site at the Swan Creek Wetlands Area, adjacent to the Brandon Shores Power Plant. Because the whole parcel is forested, marsh, or surface water, it is completely within the Green Infrastructure Network in our masterplan. One Google Maps reviewer calls it, "One of the top places to bird in Maryland."
The development application proposes 1,927 homes and 64,700 square feet of retail space, and to make all that work on the site, they asked for modifications to circumvent restrictions for forest conservation, floodplain management, nontidal wetlands, streams, and specimen trees. The application was submitted five days before the county’s moderately priced dwelling unit requirements took effect.
The Office of Planning and Zoning recently denied the environmental modifications requests. The developer has until September 11 to submit an amended application that complies with the law. I don’t know what the developer will do next, and I don’t tell the reviewers what their conclusions should be. They are professionals.
But I do know that our Green Infrastructure Master Plan mandates that we thoroughly explore opportunities to protect environmental assets like this property. So we will comply.
Until next week...