Variance

The following is the schedule of Anne Arundel County hearings on zoning reclassifications, special exceptions and variances.The following will be held before administrative hearing officers in County Council Chambers, 44 Calvert St., Annapolis:Aug. 2010: 30 a.m. -- Peter Ponne, to permit a deck addition with narrower setbacks than required on property along the south side of Bay Hills Drive, south of Mystic Lane in Arnold.Aug. 279: 30 a.m. -- Theresa Duffy and Terrance Shaw, to permit a dwelling addition with narrower setbacks than required on property along the north side of Jasper Court, east of Jasper Lane in Crofton.

Hampstead's Board of Zoning Appeals has denied developer Martin K. P. Hill's request for a zoning variance that would have permitted him to build larger, more expensive homes in his North Carroll Farms IV subdivision.Last month, Hill applied for a reduction in the town's rear and side yard setback requirements for 148 single-family homes. In some cases, the variance would have reduced the yard space between the new houses and the homes of adjacent property owners in the North Carroll Farms development.

The county Board of Appeals approved yesterday a variance to allow a Brooklyn Park church to build a 164-seat sanctuary at Hammonds Lane and Trillo Avenue.The board voted 5-2 to grant the variance to Christian Bible Church, ruling it would be consistent with other development in the neighborhood, which has a Lutheran church, a nursing home and two medical clinics.Northern Anne Arundel County is nearly fully developed, and it would be difficult for the church to find other land, the board said.

The county Board of Appeals is expected to grant a variance to a Brooklyn Park church that wants to build a sanctuary at Hammonds Lane and Trillo Avenue.The board voted 5-2 at its meeting Thursday for a motion to grant the variance to Christian Bible Church. The decision will not be final until minutes of the meeting are signed by a majority of the seven-member board in several weeks.The 120-member nondenominational church meets at Arundel Village Plaza, in the 5500 block of Ritchie Highway.

If a school rents a charter bus, does that make it a school bus?That's the question the county faces today when the owner of a bus storage facility asks for permission to keep five charter buses as school buses on his three-acre site on Broad Neck Road in Arnold.John J. Lonergan Jr., owner of Chesapeake Charter Inc., also wants the Board of Appeals to grant him a variance to expand his building to store 40 buses -- eight more than his current total.The board hearing is set for 6: 30 p.m. today in County Council chambers on the first floor of the Arundel Center, 44 Calvert St., in Annapolis.

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- My 17-year-old sister has a collage of teen-age vices strewn across her floor: cool Absolut Vodka advertisements, magazines with anorexic women on the cover and, the craftiest demon of them all, U.S. News & World Report's guide to ''America's Best Colleges.''This subjective guide to choosing colleges includes a number of useful articles along with the famous college rankings. The rankings are justified, according to the magazine, because ''when consumers invest in simple household appliances, this sort of information is freely available.

Bruce Googins understands that residents of Belvoir Farms want to be able to keep their boats on nearby Manderes Creek. It's just that he doesn't think they should be able to build a 23-slip community marina on environmentally sensitive land to do it.But Robert A. Shade, who lives in Belvoir Farms, is tired of driving 45 minutes to a marina on Kent Island to get to his 38-foot power boat. He would be "overjoyed" to have a marina only a few miles from home, he says.Both men will be closely monitoring a Board of Appeals hearing tonight on a request by the Belvoir Farms Homeowners Association Inc. for a variance to build the marina on 12.7 acres at the head of the creek.

A Severna Park optician's plans to build a home on the Severn River received another setback when a state appeals court refused to overturn the decisions of a lower court and county zoning officials.The Court of Special Appeals ruled that Circuit Judge Raymond G. Thieme Jr. was correct when he upheld a county Board of Appeals decision to deny a variance to F. Nicholas Codd to build on Sullivan Cove.Codd said yesterday that he would appeal the ruling to the Court of Appeals or scale back the size of the proposed house and reapply to the Board of Appeals.

LET'S BE CHARITABLE and say there's a chance Worcester County's homebuilders and developers are not the most churlish in the state.Maybe they are just advertising their mean-spiritedness better there than anywhere else.I refer to a 10-person task force appointed by the beach resort county's new commissioners in January with the ostensibly worthy goal of streamlining permitting processes.The task force, virtually all developers and contractors, has turned it into an abusive witch hunt, chronicled by the local paper, Ocean City Today, and its reporter Dave Wilson Jr.Planning and building permit staffers are hauled into public meetings, where developers who couldn't tell an environmentally sound project from a bomb crater openly bully those charged with regulating them.

The owner of a trucking company that has operated for nearly four decades on the edge of a residential neighborhood in White Marsh yesterday asked a state appeals court to overturn a ruling that could force him to move his business."