The Anne Arundel County Council’s recent override of County Executive John R. Leopold’s veto of a rezoning amendment gives a green light to Arundel Gateway, a mixed use project proposed on 300 acres near Route 198 and the Baltimore-Washington Parkway in Laurel. The developers, Ribera Development and Greenberg Gibbons plan to construct 1,600 residential units, 360,000 square feet of office, 160,000 square feet of retail space and a 150-room hotel. The rezoning amendment was needed to change the property’s current zoning from industrial to mixed use.
Opponents of the County Council’s veto argue that the rezoning amendment is tantamount to “spot zoning,” an always controversial and sometimes, but not necessarily, illegal process in which a planning office seeks to amend the zoning classification of a particular parcel of land without changing the zoning of surrounding property also within the original classification. Typically, applications for rezoning are addressed during the county’s comprehensive rezoning process occurring once every 10 years. The County Executive’s position is that the rezoning application for Arundel Gateway should be included in the comprehensive rezoning process along with hundreds of other rezoning applications, and the grant of the zoning amendment for a single property amounts to preferential treatment being given to one group of developers. On the other side, the County Council believes the amendment to allow Arundel Gateway’s rezoning classification change is necessary for the good of the entire community in order to meet the infrastructure needs for the approximately 15,000 new BRAC-related jobs anticipated for the Fort Meade area in 2011.
Whether the rezoning amendment benefiting the Arundel Gateway project is challenged in court, we will have to wait and see. The BRAC Blog will furnish updates.
- Tami Daniel
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment