Bill 36-11: Restricting PUD Revocations in Baltimore County

On Monday, June 6th, Bill 36-11 was submitted at the Baltimore County Council Meeting. This Bill creates a 60 day time limitation to revoke a PUD by a new Councilman.

To my knowledge, the only PUD that was ever revoked by the Council was the Thistle Road PUD which was initialized earlier this year by Councilman Tom Quirk and approved by the entire Council. 

As background information a PUD (Planned Unit Development) is an alternate developmental process which is supposed to be utilized to mix commercial and retail buildings with residential properties to create walkable communities to efficiently use land while creating open space.

This is achieved by taking the underlying density of the entire site allowed by the existing zoning and condensing the construction to a portion of the property. This overrides standard setbacks and separation of the different types of structures within the PUD but also has increased standards for construction and other requirements.

This process has been misused by several developers to propose only one type of housing in their projects with pressure on the councilman to increase the density so that they can overbuild the area since the setbacks from other buildings within the PUD are waived.

This potentially puts increased stress on the infrastructure in the area such as the roadways and schools. It is this writer's understanding that the Thistle Road Project would place 10 single-family homes on the site which without the resolution by the previous councilman, the site would not allow any dwellings.

The prior councilman misused the provision of the code (Section 430.3.C.2) which states that a PUD placing residences on zoned business properties would get up to the density of a DR 16 zoned property by granting the maximum possible density. He had ignored Section 302 of the code which states that the area, which includes density, and the height of residences proposed for business properties are governed by the predominate adjacent zoned residential properties or by DR 5.5 restrictions if there are no adjacent residential properties.

This is not a conflict in the code since these adjacent areas do not exceed the density allowed by DR 16 but it is more restrictive.   My initial thoughts on the legislation are as follows: 

• 1. I would think that we would be more concerned about legislation submitted during the last 60 days of their term by a non-reelected Councilmember than we would to limit the revoking authority to a 60-day period within the beginning of a term of a newly elected official. 
• 2. It should be noted that prior PUD Law changes, such as the 2010 the "no PUDs being allowed outside of the URDL"  change, did not have this retroactive, all encompassing  feature. It seems that this legislation is targeting a specific action without explicitly identifing it while also protecting other PUDs that should possibly be revoked for many reasons.
•  3. There are many other PUD problems that exist and have cost the communities a lot of money and time to represent their positions at hearings and appeals but there has been no effort to address those problems. 
• 4. The major issue that the Council should consider revoking, is their ability to increase the density of a PUD beyond the limit that the underlying zoning would allow. This would still allow PUDs to mix retail and commercial businesses into the residential ares of the PUD in accordance with the PUD laws. This would also have resolved a lot of the communities objections on prior PUDs which would make the process smoother with fewer conflicts.

The BCC PAC is in the process of  reviewing the PUD laws to make recommendations to the County Council to improve the PUD legislation.The comment session is scheduled for 2 p.m. on June 28 with the vote on this bill scheduled for 6 p.m. on July 5.

It is important to get your comments to the Council by June 28. I would encourage people to contact their Community Associations to also submit a comment from their Communities. 

Allen Robertson

Secretary, BCC PAC