Baltimore County, the largest jurisdiction in the Baltimore region, has only seven council members who yield incredible power. For example in zoning.
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| Baltimore County Masterplan: Ransacked by the Council |
This was once again on display this week when the county council voted about nearly 400 zoning issues in a process that is as obtuse as its name: Quadrennial CZMP. This stands for comprehensive zoning map process, whereby the "map" part stands for the fact that this is geographically specific zoning that shows on the map (versus changes to the zoning code that can happen any time). The operation goes over two years from the time applications are allowed to the day of the vote and is repeated every four years. In those two years all applications for re-zoning are placed on a log of issues that are posted online. Each county resident can apply for zoning changes on any parcel of land that is zoned. Each issue is reviewed and commented by the planning department and the planning board of the county, both can suggest modifications to the original application.
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| Mixed use that could be TOD: denied for Lutherville |
The rationale for doing all the re-zoning in one consolidated process sounds convincing. It allows to see the bigger picture of what all changes combined would do to the County as a whole and how those changes would advance or hamper the goals and objectives of the county masterplan. That is the theory. The practice is quite different and actually resembles the opposite.
It is hard to know where to begin with a critique of the process or describe all the places where it goes off the rails. As former Baltimore County planning director Keller stated in the Baltimore Banner, "the system pretty much sucks".
To begin with, this round of rezoning falls half way into the old 2020 masterplan and halfway into the new 2030 masterplan which is now in effect. In other words, applicants went by a plan that was on its last breath when they filed for zoning change while the council voted when the new plan is already in effect. Zoning is an act of planning that by definition must look forward and think ahead.
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| Online access to the log of issues |
The adoption of the new masterplan in itself was another example of the council power going awry. The council with its almost absolute powers ran rough-shot over the plan in the last moments of it being adopted as the guiding document and after years of preparation. Several renegade council members took the most important designation of the plan, the nodes out. One council member nixed out all nodes in his entire district, a random and capricious act. The Planning Director sums this up in his "director's report" on the CZMP:
Council’s amendments removed, or altered, a number of the Node Place Types that were provided in the draft Master Plan 2030, creating voids in the Place Type mapped areas. These have been designated as Undefined in the land use Place Types. The absence of a land use designation in these areas prevented determinations of consistency or inconsistency with Master Plan 2030.
The planning department did, in fact look at all the issues in the aggregate in a time consuming process that included "research regarding development proposals, zoning history, applicable school capacity, infrastructure and field visits", review of "comments from several county agencies, meeting with the applicants and attending public hearings to obtain community comments. The director's report summarizes:
A total of 389 rezoning requests were received, totaling 9,439.55 acres. Requests for the NC zoning designation, alone, totaled 2,174.84 acres. The Department of Planning recommended zoning changes to 73 issues which involved 725.89 acres.
So far so good, the planners riddled down the chaos to a manageable change, had the council not messed up the new masterplan and weren’t the Masterplan out of sync with refining... But the orderly and systematic review of the planning department becomes much less meaningful when they have to hand the entire issue log over to the Planning Board which is far more developer friendly and recommended way more zoning changes than the department.
The real kicker, though, is that the councilmen (yes they are all men) don't have to abide by neither what the planning department recommends nor what the Planning Board finds, nor by anything what the public told them.
In the voting reality that took place once again this week, each council member has not only the last word on voting up or down on the application itself or the recommendations they can actually change the zoning in the the final vote to something different altogether. Yes, that's right! What actually stands at the end of a 2-year arduous process may have nothing to do with what the applicant wanted or what the planners and planning board members recommended. It may be a decision that has never been vetted by anyone at all and it will stand for four years unless somebody can prove to the Board of Appeals that there was an actual error, that it was grievously capricious or that the area in question has undergone such drastic change after the zoning was enacted, that it would be absurd to uphold it.
In that vain, and in a move that defies all planning logic, Councilman Jack rezoned a former mall that is now a partially occupied shopping center in Lutherville right next to a light rail station not to mixed use (as applied for) as needed for a transit oriented development, but to DR16, ie. relatively low density housing which makes all existing use "conditional", i.e not "by right" anymore but subject to being revoked when any change is planned.
What if the other council members find a particular move of a colleague especially obnoxious or egregious? In theory, they could vote the district representative's motion down. In reality, though, this has never happened in the history of the council. In part, this has practical reasons. No council member can understand the complexity of nearly 400 zoning issues and even less discuss them in a session where all are supposed to be voted into law. But the "councilmanic courtesy" principle goes beyond those practical matters. It is an overall "gentlemen's" agreement that applies the rule of "mind your own damn business" to countywide planning where it surely isn't appropriate.
It is particularly inappropriate in a county that has a severe housing shortage and is under a mandate to create 1000 affordable housing units in 10 years. It is inappropriate in a county where NIMBYs are at time openly or veiled racist and where the population is stagnant because there is nobody who guides development in a manner that is rational and above board.
Council members cannot take donations while the CZMP is underway, but, of course, they take them before and after to an extent that citizens' trust in local decision in Baltimore County is largely lost. Or as the chair of the policy advocacy group "We the People" writes in an email to members:
Why does this all matter? Because allowing each Councilmember to run his or her district as an individual fiefdom divides us from one another, and deprives us of the opportunity to build on our collective strengths. We are not seven individual counties, united by a loose alliance of roads, sewers and water pipes. We are One County. (Nick Stewart, We The People)
Division is a big loss in a time when only confidence in democratic institutions can hold the society somehow together. Gaining such trust is still the easiest on the local level where "potholes" are neither Republican nor Democrat", but it Maryland's third largest jurisdiction needs a very different council for that.
Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
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