Mayors seek to strengthen county’s growth buffer plan

By Eugene Paik epaik@cecilwhig.com

Officials from the county and municipalities will re-form a subcommittee to iron out details on a plan that would keep residential growth in lock-step with county infrastructure.

Local leaders decided at Thursday’s Council of Governments meeting to return to a previous draft of the adequate public facilities ordinance crafted by the group.

The call to focus again on the old proposal came after several Cecil County mayors took issue with a draft created earlier this year by the county.

“Myself, I felt it was not enough and not nearly adequate for what we wanted to cover,” said Cecilton Mayor John Bunnell.

The county’s version came in much smaller than the one envisioned by a Council of Governments sub-committee, which included officials such as Bunnell, County Commissioner Mark Guns and Rising Sun Mayor Judy Cox.

Focusing mainly on roads and schools, the county’s draft relied heavily on the ability to obtain an impact fee to pay for infrastructure expansions.

The differences were severe: The original version was much broader in scope, focusing on roads, public safety, water and sewer and schools. It was also dependent on a new comprehensive rezoning in the county.

County Commissioners President William C. Manlove said the county’s version was scaled down so that an incremental approach could be taken.

“We worried about stretching things too far,” he said. “My thought was that this was a beginning rather than an end.”

Still, Cox said she was disappointed by the stark changes between the two versions.

“We were given a task to do, and it seemed it kind of fell on deaf ears,” she said.

By being too ambitious with the proposal, Guns and Manlove said, the county could open itself to construction obligations that it could not afford to honor.

They said an impact fee, assessed on each new home built in the county, would be needed for the plan to work.

“You cannot require a developer to pay for a school or a room in a school,” Guns said.

Bunnell argued that the county could avoid being solely responsible for major capital costs by piggy-backing the proposal with carefully crafted development zones. The action would prevent any loopholes that could be exploited by developers, he said.

The catch, however, is that the county’s eight towns must also be on board with the plan and participate in the rezoning.

Thursday’s workgroup expressed hope that refining the joint public facilities ordinance would persuade the county’s state delegation to be more sympathetic to enacting a local impact fee.