Important County Commissioner meeting Oct 20

The COASTKEEPER wants to remind you about the County Commissioner work session Tuesday Oct. 20, at 1:30 pm at the Govt. office building in Snow Hill.

The October 20 work session will be to review the revised ZONING MAPS, based on input that was given to the County during the Public Hearing in June and based on your written comments.

The Planning Commission is submitting some very good changes to the proposed zoning districts, particularly more protective zoning for the Sinepuxent Road and Holly Grove Road areas, which are the headwaters to three very important creeks (Ayers, Trappe, Herring.) Based on ACT’s comments and yours, this area will now see a larger land area protected as a Resource Protection District.

We are also pleased with the inclusion of more protective language/text regarding our impaired waterways and the development along these waterways.
Significant changes have also been recommended for the Rt. 611 corridor and for South Point, and also down in the Stockton area.

Thanks to unprecedented public participation and support, Assateague Coastal Trust is generally pleased with the revisions being proposed to the Draft Zoning Code and Land Use Map.

Those of you who live in the South Point area might want to review this observation made by County staff to the Planning Commissioners regarding the revised E-1 zoning districts in South Point and along the Rt. 611 corridor:

"Even though the requested retention in the E-1 Estate District is not consistent with the Comprehensive Plan, the staff and Planning Commission have no objection to doing so and would therefore recommend that the E-1 Estate District be retained in the MD Rt. 611/South Point area.   However, the citizens do need to realize that in the next planning period the E-1 Estate District will need to be abolished and another zoning designation placed upon the area.  The citizens should give serious consideration to what type of zoning classification is most in keeping with the area without creating extensive non-conforming lots or uses or having unanticipated adverse impacts to themselves".

While it’s humorous that County Staff uses this instance to note the E-1 District is not consistent with the Comprehensive Plan when it was County Staff that recommended the Commissioners RETAIN the E-1 zoning, it should also be noted the 2006 Comprehensive Land Use Map adopted by the County does indeed indicate a zoning district designation for the eliminated E-1 districts – look at the 2006 Land Use Map - all E-1 districts have been reverted to an Agricultural designation. Furthermore, if you read the ‘Watershed Characterizations’ in the land use section of the 2006 Comprehensive Plan, there is a very clear direction on what should be done!

At recent meetings with County staff, Ed Tudor has pointed out that perhaps residents in current E-1 Districts might not like to have a chicken house built next door to them. If you read the proposed zoning District definitions, you will see that the Proposed A-2 agricultural zoning district and the current E-1 zoning District share the same allowed uses, including poultry operations, animal waste storage lagoons, aquaculture operations, and other agricultural uses, and while the A-2 District might allow for a more commercial use these are by special exception only, so the public would have an opportunity to question those uses.

There was a reason the 2006 Comprehensive Plan called for the elimination of the E-1, which the current County Commissioners have refused to deal with, and the reason was because most of our E-1 zoning districts are in the flood plain, Critical Area, or resource sensitive areas. Up-zoning these remaining E-1 Districts to higher density uses is not sound land planning if they are located away from public services such as water and wastewater, so the Comprehensive Land Use maps recommended an agricultural zoning designation.

You can read Mr. Tudor’s full comments to the Planning Commission on the ACT website, here. The zoning map comments are located near the end of the document.  ACT does not have a copy of the most current recommendations from the Planning Commission to the County Commissioners, however this document is fairly representational of those recommendations.

Assateague Coastal Trust agrees with Mr. Tudor’s assessment that the citizens in the E-1 Districts should give serious consideration to the zoning designations during the next Comprehensive Planning round of re-zoning. This is only a year away, ironically, since it has taken the county so long to get around to implementing the 2006 Comprehensive Plan. ACT will keep you updated on the next round of zoning updates so you, the public, can have adequate time to become involved in the process.

Meanwhile- A show of citizen support at the Commissioner’s work session on October 20 will help ACT keep the pressure on so the Commissioners will accept the Planning Commission recommendations and not try to weaken these recommendations.

I know it’s difficult to attend these day time meetings on a work day. And we are sorry we don’t have a way to post actual word for word transcripts so the public could read what was said and what happened at these public meetings.

Perhaps someday, with enough citizen input, the County will schedule these types of meetings for the evening so that greater public participation or observation may take place. Or perhaps one day the County will actually consider live video presentation of their public meetings on a public access cable channel! Something to push for during the next election cycle??

Thank you again for your participation this past summer in the drafting of our new zoning code. We made some significant changes for the better and we need your help to keep the County Commissioners committed to keeping these changes!