Zoning Hearing

The Greater Elkridge Community Association has rescheduled its community meeting to allow members to attend a Howard County Council hearing on zoning map amendments for Elkridge and the U.S. 1 Corridor planning areas. The council hearing is scheduled for 7 p.m. Thursday in the Banneker Room of the George Howard Building, 3430 Court House Drive, Ellicott City. The association's meeting will be Oct. 9 at 7:30 p.m. at the Elkridge firehouse, 6275 Old Washington Road. A panel discussion of the plan to build a ReVisions group home on Bauman Drive in Elkridge is planned.

A county board looking for a vision of Howard's development future is hearing the same mantra from dozens of people faced with the possibility of commercial operations moving into their communities: No, no, a thousand times no. "This is the domino effect we are so concerned about," said Cathi Higgins, who is among those against plans to rezone nearly 40 acres along Montgomery Road in Ellicott City to commercial, proposed in large part because Long Gate...

When Phyllis B. Brotman heard last fall that the Rev. Thomas Cobb had bought a brick, four-bedroom house on McDonogh Road in Owings Mills and planned to build a church on the surrounding property, she paid him a visit. Brotman's message was simple. First, the president of the McDonogh-Field Association wanted to welcome Cobb and his family to the area. Next, she told him that if the neighborhood association had its way, his church would never get built. Brotman, who has lived in the area for 42 years, called the Apostolic Truth Tabernacle Church's plans to build a 300-seat sanctuary, day-care center and Christian school on 7.8 acres in the Lyon Acres development "an invasion of privacy."

Eldersburg residents concerned about noise and light pollution from a proposed drive-in theater plan to express their concerns tomorrow at a public hearing before the Carroll County Board of Zoning Appeals. Residents have invited a noise-control specialist from the Maryland Department of the Environment to bolster their arguments when the zoning appeals board resumes a hearing that began last month. "We will be on hand to answer questions of a technical nature and offer opinions as to noise levels," said George Harman, an MDE noise program specialist.

Michael Crable still recalls his first encounter with the twilight zone that is a Howard County land-use hearing. Crable had dropped by a county Board of Appeals meeting to hear about a proposed retirement complex on Route 144 in Marriottsville. Instead, he found himself wondering if he was in court and wishing he had brought a lawyer. After a consultant for the developer made his pitch, Crable, the only resident present, started to voice a concern about the project - only to be cut off in mid-sentence.

If Les Jenkins has his way, a 32-acre stretch between Ritchie Highway and the Dover Road dump will be brimming with go-cart tracks, skateboard parks and other amusements he says are lacking in Glen Burnie. If certain residents and state representatives have anything to say about it, Jenkins will have to take his idea elsewhere. Yesterday, zoning hearing officer Stephen LeGendre heard from both sides about the proposed Les Jenkins Family Fun Park during a daylong hearing on whether to grant Jenkins a special exception to build an amusement park in a commercially zoned district.

In an effort to placate neighbors, a Brooklyn Park substance-abuse treatment center has asked the county to indefinitely postpone a zoning hearing, scheduled for yesterday, that is related to plans to more than double the center's operations. The operators of Damascus House, a 17-bed treatment center in the 4200 block of Ritchie Highway a few blocks south of the city line, are planning to buy a property on nearby Edison Street and renovate a house there into a 15-bed facility. It also wants to build two four-bedroom transitional homes on the site.

Claiming they were kept in the dark about a residential drug treatment center's expansion plans, residents of a Brooklyn Park neighborhood are launching an 11th-hour effort to block the project. Damascus House, a 17-bed center in the 4200 block of Ritchie Highway, is planning to buy a property nearly in its back yard on Edison Street, expand and renovate an existing house there into a 15-bed facility, and build a pair of four-bedroom transitional homes on adjacent lots. Damascus House's contract to purchase the property a few streets south of the Baltimore city line is contingent on rectifying a zoning anomaly: The home on the lot it wants to buy is split almost down the middle between residential and commercial zoning.

A group of Highland and Clarksville residents has joined in opposition to a developer's plan to convert a rural turkey farm in Fulton into one of the largest mixed-use communities in Howard County since the founding of Columbia three decades ago.These residents have joined forces with the Greater Beaufort Park Citizens Association to fight developer Stewart G. Greenebaum's proposal to create a Columbia-style village of homes, offices and retail stores....