It’s been a terrible week in Texas. The death toll from flooding is 120 as I write this, and there are still some 170 missing. Please join me in keeping everyone impacted by this tragedy in your prayers, and in supporting all efforts to assist.
Fox45 asked me in my monthly live interview Tuesday morning if our county, almost completely surrounded by the Chesapeake Bay and Patuxent River, is prepared for this new era of super-heavy rainfall and flooding. My answer was that we have an excellent team that does disaster preparedness, response, and recovery work at our Office of Emergency Management, and that the 2025 update to our Hazard Mitigation Plan is in public review and will go before our County Council for approval soon.
Had the interview lasted longer, I’d have added that our built environment has a major impact on the severity of flooding and our ability to survive it, and that our Resilience Authority is a national leader in financing the projects that protect us. I did mention the City Dock project in Annapolis and our longstanding dependence on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for infrastructure and disaster funding.
If you have not already subscribed to Alert Anne Arundel, our emergency mass notification system, please do so now. And if your community has an interest in emergency preparedness planning, please contact OEM at oemoutreach@aacounty.org or click here.
Yesterday, I had the honor of congratulating and welcoming graduates of the 100th Anne Arundel County Police Recruit Class at their graduation ceremony. The majority of these graduates will remain in our county, serving our communities as members of the Anne Arundel County Police Department, Anne Arundel County Sheriff’s Office, and Annapolis Police Department. I found myself looking out on the crowd through the graduates’ eyes - wearing the badge for the first time, in the presence of families, anticipating the next day on the beat with a field training officer, anxiously listening to the radio, awaiting their first engagements with county residents, hoping to remember all that they learned in eight months at the academy.
I told them that they are what holds our communities together, that rules and laws are meaningless if they’re not enforced, and that in divided times like ours, when some groups think they’re more worthy than others, that fair enforcement of our laws is needed most, laws that we may or may not like, but laws that nobody is above. And I thanked them.
On Monday night, the County Council unanimously approved the transfer of an underutilized parcel of county property to a private developer. It’s a first. We did it because the land was in need of cleanup and redevelopment, and was ideally suited for housing.
The address is 7409 Baltimore Annapolis Boulevard, a couple of blocks south of the last stop on the light rail to Baltimore, across the street from the B&A Trail, a few blocks north of Glen Burnie Town Center, and a quick walk to Sawmill Creek Park and Pascal Senior Center.
District 2 County Councilmember Allison Pickard first brought the parcel to my attention. She argued that the Town Center and Boulevard needed revitalization, and that the longstanding county plan to expand the site as storage and repair of county vehicles would be counterproductive. So we pivoted.
Anne Arundel Economic Development Corporation, under the leadership of our phenomenal CEO Amy Gowan, brought together a committee to review proposals for transformation of the site to housing that would be compatible with the surrounding community and with enough density to bring customers to the local businesses. The agreement approved on Monday night was with the winning group, and is in my view exactly the “missing middle” kind of mix that we need more of.
It has four-story buildings in the back with for-sale multi-family condos, and both for-sale and rental townhouses closer to the road. It will include community areas, community gardens, and a “tot lot,” and the adjacent Sawmill Creek will benefit from the environmental remediation that is included in the contract. The project not only meets but exceeds the moderately priced dwelling unit requirements in county code, with no government subsidy. This will be a great place to live.
Speaking of housing development, I was skimming through our county’s 2024 Annual Development Measures and Indicators Report to Maryland Department of Planning this week and noticed that 99% of residential building permits and 98% of residential construction were in our Priority Funding Areas, far surpassing our goal of 80%. Those are the areas where the state has said that development should take place, where infrastructure exists. In other words, we seem to be sticking to the smart growth principles of our own Plan2040: smarter, greener, and more equitable.
And finally, you’ve heard me complain often in this letter about the complexities of our land use code, how bills get passed each year to help this or that landowner, and how over time the code becomes a patchwork of cumbersome regulation that is almost impossible to navigate.
Well, I’m not alone. Advocates, Councilmembers, and our development review staff have been complaining as well. In fact, Office of Planning and Zoning (OPZ) staff have kept a log over the years of all the things that should be fixed, but never before has there been a County Executive, a County Council, and a well-informed citizenry enough in alignment to tackle the problem. But now I believe we are ready.
Yesterday, I met with the team to set a schedule of stakeholder engagement and drafting that will produce a massive cleanup bill by the end of the year to correct a whopping 275 inconsistencies and inefficiencies. Wish us luck and stay tuned.
Until next week…