Good evening, Chairman Holupka and Members of the Planning Bord. My name is Nick Stewart and I am speaking on behalf of the advocacy group We The People – Baltimore County. We are a good governance group focused on smart growth, housing and revitalization. I am joined tonight by Marsha McLoughlin, who is the former planning director for Howard County.
Preparation and adoption of the Baltimore County Master Plan and the subsequent CZMP have been major efforts and have finally been approved. Despite our issues with those processes, now is the time to focus on Master Plan implementation.
This should be the year where we actually use the Master Plan to govern and determine the choices we make for our investments and capital budget. Rather than just being an aspirational document that sits on a shelf, the Master Plan, and the thousands of community conversations it reflects, should permeate each part of our budget process, including how we create our six-year Capital Improvement Program and the level of detail that is truly necessary for this program.
Perhaps the most important challenge is improving the capacity of designated nodes in the Master Plan to accommodate and spur reinvestment and revitalization, especially in view of our housing crisis. Most of the nodes are located on aging radial corridors, which have aging infrastructure. Because of this, the Capital Budget should be structured to address the following three points (I will address the first two, and Marsha will handle the final point):
1. Adequate Public Facility Priorities: The adequacy of our schools, roads and sewer systems are all critical. However, there is never enough funding to address our capital budget challenges, so priorities need to be set – and they must be set with specificity. After these priorities are set, we should hold ourselves accountable to them and resist changing them. We hope that the Planning Board will assess the short-, mid- and long-term potential for node redevelopment and use this evaluation to recommend short-, mid- and long-term capital budget priorities for the consideration of the County Executive and the Council.
2. Conformance with Master Plan: The Master Plan is intended to guide County decisions and priorities on a wide range of both development and non-development issues and programs. We should require that if a County agency submits a Capital Budget request, the agency should provide a brief explanation as to which element of the Master Plan is being addressed and how. If the agency declines to do so, we should know why not.
3. Sufficient Funding for Adequate Public Facilities: The County has a history of granting waivers to APFO impact fees and therefore has collected very little revenue to support needed public facility improvements. No impact fees were collected in FY 21 and 22; last year impact fees were waived for 666 out of 687 residential and commercial building permits. Anne Arundel, Howard and other Central Maryland counties raise a significant amount of revenue from APFO impact fees and excise taxes. This has not deterred developers from building projects in those counties.
We strongly recommend that the Planning Board reach out to nearby jurisdictions regarding the APFO revenue generated annually and their assessment of which approaches have been the most successful (excise taxes provide more flexibility than impact fees). Baltimore County is going to need significant revenue for APFO infrastructure to initiate redevelopment of Master Plan-designated nodes. Successful node redevelopment will eventually generate a lot of property, income and sales tax revenues, but this will take time. Increased revenues are needed now to support the Master Plan and node redevelopment.
Thank you for your time and consideration,
Nick Stewart and Marsha McLaughlin
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