If getting a new development approved and built is a battle, the skirmishes are escalating in and around Turf Valley.
After the recent launch of a petition drive challenging a law that that affects the size of grocery stores, the Howard County Chamber of Commerce has issued a call to increase the number of signatures required on such a petition.
"The ... County Charter requirement for 5,000 signatures to petition the ... action of elected bodies to referendum is low and antiquated," read an "advocacy alert" the chamber e-mailed to 1,600 people at 850 businesses last week.
FOR THE RECORD - In the Dec. 28 edition of the Howard County section, an article about residents' reaction to a county law to allow for a larger grocery store in Turf Valley incorrectly identified Helen Carey, a resident of the community.
The article also incorrectly described the response of the Vistas neighborhood association to a presentation by the developer. Association members gave verbal approval to the plan for the shopping center.
The Baltimore Sun regrets the errors.
The threshold signature number, the letter said, should "reflect a reasonable percentage of the registered voters in Howard County, rather than a fixed number."
The letter is the latest volley in a back-and-forth between developers of the Town Center at Turf Valley, a shopping center now in the planning stages, and a small activist group that calls itself Howard County Citizens for Open Government.
Marc Norman, the group's organizer, says the county approved the project with too little study and too much secrecy.
"This is too big a change to go through with so little public attention," says Norman, a Turf Valley resident and frequent critic of Mangione Family Enterprises, the company that owns the 809-acre golf-and-residential community near Marriottsville.
The exchange of fire began in the fall, when the County Council voted to approve a zoning regulation amendment, ZRA-100, which increased the size of grocery stores permitted in Turf Valley from 18,000 to 55,000 square feet. The change allows for a store the size of a smaller Safeway or Giant supermarket rather than, say, a Trader Joe's.
For several weeks, Norman's group has been circulating a petition to take the new law, Council Bill 58, to public referendum.
If it secures 2,500 signatures from county residents by Jan.5, and another 2,500 by Feb. 4, the law would be suspended. County voters would then decide its fate during a general election in November 2010.
Town Center at Turf Valley is scheduled to open in 2011.
As of Wednesday, Norman said his group had amassed more than 2,000 signatures, and he expects to meet all deadlines.
Greenberg Gibbons Commercial, the Owings Mills-based retail property specialist behind Town Center at Turf Valley, says in today's economy, no shopping center with an anchor supermarket smaller than 55,000 square feet could survive.
