Adequate Facilities

Carroll department heads held a dress rehearsal for the County Commissioners yesterday on the latest version of a bill intended to manage the county's residential growth.The two-hour meeting on a proposed adequate facilities law was a prologue to a "public information meeting" on the 14-page bill that will be held at 7 p.m. Monday at the Westminster Senior Center.Although Commissioners Donald I. Dell and Richard T. Yates expressed concerns about some clauses, the bill has the approval of local bankers, developers, and homebuilders and is likely to pass with slight, if any revision.

THE FLAP OVER Carroll County Commissioner W. Benjamin Brown's private meeting to seek an acceptable compromise with the development community on building of recorded lots was much ado about nothing.But it reminds Carroll County of the problems inherent in a commissioner form of government, where all three commissioners wear both executive and legislative hats. Such a meeting wouldn't have been a problem under a charter form of government, where those important powers are divided. And for all the criticism of Mr. Brown's methods, commissioners Richard T. Yates and Donald I. Dell indicate they are in general agreement with the proposal that came out of that meeting.

Residential developers won a major victory yesterday when county officials agreed to write the homebuilders' proposals into a bill intended to manage the county's growth.Earlier versions of the legislation would have barred owners of recorded lots from building homes if the lots were in parts of the county that failed to pass adequate-facilities tests for schools, roads and public safety.But the next and likely final draft of the bill would follow current policy and allow owners of recorded lots to get building permits whenever they want.

Carroll County Commissioner W. Benjamin Brown may have wasted his time last week by holding a private meeting with key department heads, a land use lawyer and a bank president to draw up a memorandum of understanding on the county's proposed adequate-facilities law.Commissioners Donald I. Dell and Richard T. Yates said yesterday that they did not learn until this week that Brown had conducted the five-hour meeting at Bear Branch Nature Center on Thursday.At...

County Commissioner W. Benjamin Brown may have wasted his time last week by holding a private meeting with key department heads, a land use lawyer and a bank president to draw up a memorandum of understanding on the county's proposed adequate-facilities law.Commissioners Donald I. Dell and Richard T. Yates said yesterday that they did not learn until this week that Brown had conducted the five-hour meeting at Bear Branch Nature Center Thursday.At the time, Dell and Yates were attending the winter convention of the Maryland Association of Counties in Baltimore.

The County Commissioners and a representative of the building industry inched closer yesterday to an agreement on a proposed adequate-facilities ordinance.But the question of whether to allow owners of recorded lots to obtain building permits on demand, as has been the practice, remains unresolved.Yesterday's meeting was the latest in series the commissioners have held in an attempt to fashion an ordinance to manage the county's growth. The proposed bill would link residential subdivision approval to schools, roads and emergency services.

The County Commissioners proposed a growth control bill yesterday that would limit residential development to an average of 1,000 units a year and confine it to areas where schools, roads and public services are deemed adequate to support it.The bill, which some developers say could cripple the homebuilding industry in Carroll, requires the commissioners to determine annually which parts of the county can handle residential growth.The commissioners would decide the number of building permits to be issued -- no more than 6,000 in a six-year period, including those issued in Carroll's eight municipalities.

The County Commissioners decided yesterday that muzzling the Board of Zoning Appeals is not the way to slow the county's growth.A better solution, they say, is to enact an adequate facilities law -- something they hope to do by the end of the year.The appeals board had become a thorn for at least two of the commissioners because it reversed the county planning commission often in the past year, allowing developers to build subdivisions the planning commission had said they couldn't.For County Commissioners W. Benjamin Brown and Richard T. Yates, who appointed six newcomers to the seven-member planning commission to implement their slow-growth philosophy, that was a problem.

A COURT challenge to Carroll County's adequate public facilities criteria, in effect since last year, was inevitable. It should prompt a serious rethinking by the county's planning commission and Board of Commissioners to legally bolster, rather than abandon, the effort to peg new subdivision approvals to local school capacity.Circuit Court Judge Raymond E. Beck Sr. approved a 101-lot development in Westminster, persuaded that simply assigning the new subdivision in a different school zone (closer to those homes)

THE PURPOSE of Howard County's 1991 growth law was to prevent development from sprouting unpredictably like crabgrass, overwhelming schools and roads. The Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance was adopted after a housing surge swelled school populations and snarled many intersections.The law has worked like radar to alert county and school planners years before new neighborhoods fill with schoolchildren and mini-vans.Half the state's jurisdictions -- and all of the fast-growing suburban counties -- have such APFO laws in place.