Development Rights

Two families in financial distress are asking Baltimore County to buy the development rights to their farms so they can preserve them as agricultural land, a county official said. Owners of the two separate tracts, comprising nearly 132 acres in Cockeysville and Maryland Line, have qualified for a six-year-old program designed to preserve land that faces an immediate threat of being sold for some non-agricultural use, said Wally Lippincott, natural resource manager for the county Department of Environmental Protection and Resource Management.

Columbia-based Corporate Office Properties Trust said Thursday that it paid $125 million to acquire Baltimore developer Edwin F. Hale Sr.'s 1st Mariner Tower and surrounding land slated for a large waterfront development. COPT, which already held a $30 million secondary loan on the office building, invested $95 million more to close the deal that also included a parking lot, a utility distribution center and development rights to four waterfront lots associated with the Canton Crossing planned development, said Roger Waesche Jr., COPT's chief operating officer, during a conference call with analysts to discuss the company's third-quarter earnings.

The financially troubled developer of a huge business park being built at Aberdeen Proving Ground to serve base restructuring has backed out of the project and handed it off to Baltimore-based St. John Properties. Under plans approved by the Army, Rockville-based Opus East assigned development rights to St. John, which announced the agreement Tuesday and said it plans to start work on three or four research and office buildings. The 400-acre project, Government and Technology Enterprise, or GATE, is being developed as a 2 million- to 3 million-square-foot research and development park in partnership with the Army to handle growth from BRAC - military base restructuring.

A heavily amended zoning code appears likely to win the Harford County Council's approval Tuesday when it is scheduled for a vote. The seven-member panel added 136 amendments to the 800-page draft that was nearly two years in the writing and the subject of numerous workshops and public hearings. It was early Wednesday before the council had voted on all the changes. "The code is likely to pass because all of us understand the need to move forward on the issues," said Council President Billy Boniface.

At the first of two public hearings on the county's zoning code rewrite, questions and concerns with a proposed transfer of development rights dominated the discussion. The hearing drew such a large crowd that officials will continue the session Tuesday evening at North Harford High School. While county officials consider the sale of agricultural development rights to property owners in designated growth areas a giant step in land preservation, many residents fear it will create sprawl in rural enclaves, such as Fallston and Joppa.

Harford County has spent more than $20 million on land preservation this year, bringing to about 43,000 the number of acres in permanent protection programs, but the purchases have nearly exhausted all the funding reserves available to safeguard farms from development. If the county is to reach its goal of 55,000 acres preserved by 2012, officials say they must find alternative means, possibly a free market approach such as Transfer of Development Rights, or TDR, to continue protecting land.

Boniface vows to find common ground on development rights In his first legislative address before the County Council on Tuesday night, council President Billy Boniface will call for reform of the county's rules for transferring development rights, a hot topic among the county's agriculture community. Previous efforts have made little headway, but Boniface vowed last week to find common ground. Critics have said the county's regulations fall far short of designing a comprehensive program that would help guide development countywide, not just in farming areas.

Members of two separate branches of Maryland's historic Carroll family have submitted plans to Howard County to sell the building rights they hold on several chunks of historic Doughoregan Manor to builders in other parts of the county, preserving the land for agriculture. If approved by Howard County officials, the proposed sales would give developers the right to build on 237 acres of land elsewhere in the county, keep two large Doughoregan Manor tracts undeveloped, and bring in over $9 million for the Carroll descendents, based on the county's top price for prime preservation land.

The Howard County Council tabled a bill last night that would allow the sale of development rights by people living on at least 20 acres in rural residential zones that are contiguous to parkland. The bill, sponsored by council Chairman Guy Guzzone, a North Laurel-Savage Democrat, would help a woman who has a horse farm on land next to Schooley Mill Park, and who wants to preserve the land while still profiting from her right to develop it. He said there are other places in the county where the law could apply, allowing preservation of more rural land.

It doesn't seem as if 1.25 acres of land - smaller than a typical Safeway - are enough to quarrel over, especially when you have more than 160,000 of them, but they are at the center of a debate that will decide whether large property owners receive or lose millions of dollars. Although the dispute technically centers on a single property owner, officials on both sides acknowledge that the implications are broader, as they almost always are with zoning issues. "There are other people out there," said E. Alexander Adams, an attorney representing the property owner.