The problems associated with the “boom and bust” residential overbuilding in Frederick County have affected the lives of every school child and every motorist in Frederick County. 

Read the Truth about Residential Development, Our Taxes and Our Future.

Read the Truth about the Effects of Residential Development on our Schools.

Read the Truth about the Effects of Residential Development on our Roads.

Friends of Frederick County Position on Crum and COPT/Thatcher Annexations into Frederick City

We believe that our county and city should protect the Monocacy River corridor, productive farmland, scenic vistas, and a buffer between Frederick and Walkersville. At this time there is adequate development planned in the existing “pipeline” of future development in the city and we should develop that first, see that it is done in the most economically, socially and environmentally sustainable manner, and evaluate its impact before bulldozing greenfields.  FoFC believes that existing roads to the north are inadequate, congested and dangerous, and there’s no financial plan to solve that anytime soon.

Background

In September 2009 the City of Frederick’s Mayor and Aldermen[1] voted to annex two farms (total 436 acres) along Route 15 north of Frederick City for 1200 new homes and approximately 2.3 million ft² of non-residential (office, retail, manufacturing, hotel) space. During the Fall 2009 citizens made a good faith effort to gather 20% of city voter signatures to put these annexations to referendum but fell short of our target due to the 45 day time allowed. Judging from overwhelming citizen involvement in that effort and interest in signing the petition for referendum it was clear that citizens of Frederick City do not agree that the development plans for the Crum and COPT/Thatcher properties promote the health, safety and welfare of our city nor county.

Petition to DeAnnex the Crum and COPT/Thatcher Properties

For these reasons, on May 20^th 6:30pm Frederick City Hall Friends of Frederick County launches a petition drive for a charter amendment to change the boundaries of the City of Frederick, MD to exclude the Crum and Thatcher properties.This petition effort, to “de annex” these properties, when put on the ballot will give citizens the opportunity to vote their preference.   The petition can be downloaded off the Friends of Frederick County website (http://www.friendsoffrederickcounty.org/by-campaign/petition-deannexation-referendum/ ) and delivered or mailed to our office.  Petitions will be available at events;  petition drop off points will be announced during the petition drive.  Hear what citizens have to say.

Why deannex the Crum and COPT/Thatcher properties from the City limits?

• Route 15 is one of the most dangerous roads in Maryland – and there is little funding for improvements.  The northern annexations will add 12-15,000 car trips/day to Route 15 and arterial roads.[2] The Maryland State Highway Administration strongly recommended that the cost of planning, design and construction of the Biggs Ford Road interchange be included in the annexation agreements, that cost is estimated at $75-80 million. It was not. The Monocacy Boulevard completion (to cost $75-$80 m) is not even funded yet.[3]
• There are 3500 homes and millions of square feet of commercial space within Frederick City that should be built first before expanding outward.  These approvals include Brick Works, Northgate, Clemson Corner, Market Square, the Ballenger Creek Center and the SAIC-Frederick/NCI facility.  For a complete list of commercial projects see:  http://www.businessinfrederick.com/site_selection/development.htm
• The annexation agreements for Crumland Farm and COPT/Thatcher do not adequately address sewer, schools and fire and rescue services. There is no planned sewer service for the Crum and Thatcher properties at this point [4] and no detailed plans for school and emergency services.
• This farmland has excellent soil for growing food.  If the properties are under Frederick County jurisdiction they will be in an Agricultural Priority Preservation Area (PPA), according to the recently signed Frederick County Comprehensive Plan.

Positions from Voices of Authority

Maryland Department of Planning[5] (7/22/2009) Asks the city to look into potential sewer constraints, the expansive floodplain and the road network impacts in light of the I270/Rte 15 Multi Modal Study.

State Highway Administration[6] SHA strongly recommends that the cost of planning, design and construction of the Biggs Ford Road interchange and park and ride lot be included in the requirements for annexation, as well as dedication of Rte 15 right of way and plans for arterial roads that will need to be constructed once Sunday’s Lane is closed.

Frederick County Board of Commissioners[7] letter dated 9/2/2009 2, 2009:  Without concurrent construction plans for an interchange and the elimination of the at-grade crossings “will only exacerbate an already dangerous situation and jeopardize the safety of City and County residents.” “The Crumland Farm Agreement (pg 5) does not obligate Petitioners (meaning the developer) to fund any portion of the US 15/Biggs Ford Road interchange. The County Commissioners and the State Highway Administration believe the developers, rather than the taxpayers, should pay for this interchange.”  There is no planned sewer to either property.  Absent private funding for a new school this development will worsen school overcrowding.

Frederick County Fire and Rescue Services Division[8] (5/5/2009)on Crumland Farm annexation:  “With the potential increase in traffic traveling to the site, thus requiring vehicles to cross Route 15, the potential for accidents will increase. An increase in accidents on Route 15 may have an effect on the fire and rescue services, therefore, the Biggs Ford Road interchange should be constructed and operational before the first Use and Occupancy permit is issued for the proposed site.”

Town of Walkersville[9] (8/31/2009)  The Walkersville Burgess and Commissioners voted 3-2 in opposition to both the Crum and COPT/Thatcher annexation proposals and urged the Frederick City Board of Alderman to vote to deny them.

Monocacy Scenic River Citizens Advisory Board River Board (5/11/2009) expresses concern about the proposed alteration of the natural landscape in the 100-year floodplain on the COPT/Thatcher property and the disruption of environmental processes and functions that follow from grading, filling, and building in a floodplain—mainly the natural storage and conveyance of flood waters.

Does your organization have a position?  If so, please send it to deannexation@friendsoffrederickcounty.org.

[2] Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Trip Generation Manual, 7^th Edition, pp 268-269.

[3] Thomas, John B. (Pers Comm May 2010).  Cost for Biggs Ford Road interchange at Route 15, and the Monocacy Boulevard interchange, Frederick County Division of Planning.

[4] Tax map 57 and 48 at: http://www.frederickcountymd.gov/index.aspx?NID=1326.

[5] Conrad, Peter G., Director, Local Government Assistance, Maryland Department of Planning.

[6] Slater, Gregory I, Director, Office of Planning and Preliminary Engineering, State Highway Administration

[7] Board of County Commissioners, September 2009 (Jan Gardner, David Gray, John L Thompson, Kai J Hagen and Charles Jenkins), Frederick County MD.

[8] Dmuchowski, Michael P, Battalion Chief/Fire Marshall, Frederick County MD

[9] Hauver, Susan J, Planning and Zoning Administrator, Walkersville MD

In September 2009 the City of Frederick’s Mayor and Aldermen[1] voted to annex two farms along Route 15 north of Frederick City for 1200 new homes and approximately 2.3 million ft² of office space. Click to download the Annexation Resolution for the Crum Farm (09-18) and Resolution 09-19 Thatcher Annexation.

During the Fall 2009 citizens made a good faith effort to gather 20% of city voter signatures to put these annexations to referendum but fell short of our target due to the 45 day time allowed. Judging from overwhelming citizen involvement in that effort and interest in signing the petition for referendum it was clear that citizens of Frederick City do not agree that the development plans for the Crum and COPT/Thatcher properties promote the health, safety and welfare of our city nor county.   Read more details on the annexations, organization positions and related issues here and on the Frederick County government website.

This petition effort, to “de annex” these properties, allows unlimited time for signature gathering and when put on the ballot will give citizens the opportunity to vote their preference.

Download the Deannexation Petition for Referendum Here!

Please return the petition as soon as possible:

• mail it to:  Friends of Frederick County,  4 E Church Street, Frederick MD   21701
• call us at:  240 529 1655
• drop off points to be announced

Contact us:  deannexation@friendsoffrederickcounty.org

DOES FHS NEED A RENOVATION?

Post up to 3 photos with brief text on facebook wall at:

(http://bit.ly/friendsoffrederickcounty)

that show and tell why FHS needs a renovation.

Become a facebook fan, and sign up for FoFC’s newsletter to see winning photo.

Most convincing entry WINS  $30 OF RITA’S ICE CREAM

Entries accepted no later than 5pm May 28, 2010

Winner announced on facebook June 1, 2010.

I read with interest Rand D. Weinberg’s opinion in The FNP about the recently approved Frederick County Comprehensive Plan. If I am left unconvinced by his argument, it is because of his own actions to organize and contrive a long series of property amendments that show much less concern for the overall public good and the impact on residents than any actions by our current county commissioners in reviewing and drafting our approved plan.

In fact, Weinberg and Blaine Young represent the pointy end of the spear in political efforts to challenge and rewrite county ordinances and zonings to the benefit of their own property and power interests. This is the fox guarding the henhouse, and the cynical use of mock outrage and emotion to elicit sympathy. Outside the comp planning process, these “defenders of property rights” constantly sought individual rezoning of properties to usurp the broad goals of the plans.

In the years leading up to 2006, the cabal of development interests they represent sought to constantly amend county regulations, particularly the Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance, by text amendment in order to justify special interests. That practice was ended, but not without their objections and an attempt by Delegate Galen Clagett to support those interests by amending state law. They obfuscate the ends and absorb the time and energy of government to achieve ends for the very few, the opposite of the goals our legislators should seek to accomplish.

If property owners built future dream castles of wealth based on a property zoning, they held no current value, only imagination. That given the future development pressure and the wealth to determine it arrived, they may have found a value that did not exist presently. As my father, a staunch property rights believer, says, “If it was farmland when you bought it, why shouldn’t it stay farmland when you sell it.” A deed is not a lottery ticket, and a zoning designation is not a crystal ball.

Someday I hope that we will look to undeveloped property and farmland as our most valuable resource. The true economic value is underrealized today. Our local waterways and the Chesapeake Bay, and our very sustainability of population and shared long-term economic success, depend upon an adjustment in our recognition of land resources’ full value.

Changing our expectations, our values, our lifestyles, this may seem an unworthy hardship, an unnecessary adjustment, but we cannot proceed at our current pace of developmentand land and population impacts if our future is to accommodate our best common interests. Our crowded roads and stressed schools provide examples of our quality-of-life impacts.

I am not certain if the citizen lessons on our past civic life have been truly ingrained and safeguarded for the future of Frederick County. In the efforts by these “defenders” to strangle our interests in favor of their own, we can see that we have an important election looming in Frederick County, when we can either maintain the positive change we achieved in 2006 when electing our current board, or we can fall back to a planning process directed by favoring individual properties, which Weinberg and Young appear to prefer.

Jack Lynch

writes from Frederick

Originally published in Frederick News Post May 08, 2010

http://www.fredericknewspost.com/sections/opinion/display_lte.htm?storyid=104688

Little hope this year for aging elementary school

Originally published March 17, 2010

By Patti S. Borda

“Do you not care about us?” Lincoln Elementary School fourth-grader Katyann Bovey asked the Frederick County Commissioners on Tuesday.

She summed up the urgency and disbelief expressed by families and teachers who implored the commissioners to fund a $24 million construction project at the aging elementary school. The project has been pushed back in the current Capital Improvements Program to 2014.

Each speaker on Lincoln’s behalf described fear, shame and embarrassment about the conditions in which elementary students are expected to learn: two buildings built in 1923, separated by streets, noisy, open classrooms with no walls or fire suppression sprinklers, few doors, moldy walls, leaky roofs, unisex bathrooms. The age of the building allows it to be grandfathered in under an older fire code and allows it not to provide handicap accessibility.

Commissioner John L. Thompson Jr. urged the speakers to report fire hazards directly to the fire marshal. To those who described respiratory ailments stemming from the conditions, he advised notifying the health department.

The commissioners agreed Lincoln is in desperate need of renovation. They said there simply is no money to fund the project, not even if money were taken from the $30 million in projects scheduled for 2011.

Tuesday’s public hearing on the CIP featured only requests to put funding back in for school projects. Projects in every department have been postponed.

In addition to Lincoln’s supporters, others asked commissioners to spend more to upgrade and modernize older buildings, rather than work on new school seating capacity.

Commissioners said they are concerned about a legal action by several municipalities that seek to control development in land surrounding the municipalities, zones they call their growth areas. Commissioners said if the municipalities win, they will be allowed to overcrowd schools.

Michael Kurtianyk suggested constructing schools using public-private partnerships. Commissioners President Jan Gardner said such arrangements have conditions that make them less desirable. Higher interest rates, lease-back contracts and maintenance agreements are sometimes problems with those, she said.

Frederick County’s proposed $325 million five-year capital improvements program would fully or partially fund 107 projects and delay an estimated $307 million in projects that were included in last year’s five-year CIP.

At the end of the hearing, commissioners explained to the public that they have little hope of finding funds to do the projects they request. Thompson said he does not advocate a tax increase but asked the Finance Department to calculate what a property tax rate would have to be to fund the Lincoln project and one at Oakdale Elementary School.

The commissioners will discuss the public comments March 23. The final CIP will be adopted with the budget in May.

After established deadlines, HB 1141 (amending Article 66B) prohibits the annexation of  any property that is not included in a Municipal Growth Element.  This Growth Element must contain a detailed analysis of the growth impacts of annexing and developing properties in the municipality’s planned growth area. Prior to adopting this Growth Element, a municipality must “meet and confer” with the county in which it is located. 

 The City of Frederick established a Tier 3/Outer Growth Boundary in its Comprehensive Plan and Municipal Growth Element.  The City proposes the construction of a North South Parallel Road on the east side of Frederick through one portion of Tier 3.  In addition, the Tier 3/Outer Growth Boundary that surrounds the City includes thousands of acres of agricultural land which the City now deems eligible for annexation and development.  The construction of the Parallel Road would accelerate annexations and developments in Tier 3.  These and other developments in Tier 3 would involve the construction of thousands of residential units and hundreds of thousands of square feet of commercial space.  They would have massive impacts on public services and facilities and require huge taxpayer funded infrastructure investments to accommodate this growth.  The City did not offer the requisite analysis of these impacts and costs in its Comprehensive Plan.  

Our Position

FoFC has actively followed this issue with citizen letters to the city and county asking that the City and County “meet and confer” to clarify how the infrastructure on these large annexation agreements will be paid.

If you are interested in the correspondence please contact us:  240 529 1655, or jwiles@friendsoffrederickcounty.org.

Guest speakers were County Commissioner John  “Lennie” Thompson, who developed the proposal, and Frederick County Public Schools Facilities Services Division Executive Director Ray Barnes.

Mr. Barnes began by saying that enactment of the original APFO, as well as subsequent amendments to it, had been a significant factor in slowing growth in critically overcrowded locales so construction of the County’s school infrastructure could catch up with needs. He noted that there are still 20 schools in the county that exceed state rated capacity. However, he also explained that since the passage of the original APFO, the state has significantly dropped its capacity requirements per classroom.

The Frederick County Public School System serves the entire county, including the municipalities. So municipalities without an Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance similar to the county’s can put a more severe stress on the system through unrestrained growth, which costs county taxpayers more in taxes for school construction.

While current pressures from this imbalance are low, Mr. Barnes said, the county birth rate is experiencing a significant upward trend, which means there will be more pressure for additional infrastructure in the coming years. “The APFO contributes to reducing the operating budget of the new schools, which helps with recurring and non recurring expenses when you open a new school as well as the reducing the operating expenses for that school and others in the system,” Mr. Barnes stated.

Commissioner Thompson explained that his proposal, now law, was aimed at requiring municipalities to operate under the same Adequate Public Facilities standards as the county. “ The municipalities are complaining that we are intruding on their sovereignty by requiring them to operate under the county’s Adequate Public Facilities standards for schools,” Thompson said. He

Posted on 16 November 2009

Frederick City is poised to grow by more than 500 acres thanks to the recent annexation of two area farms, but the move remains controversial. While development advocate Bruce Dean, (left) a lawyer specializing in annexations with McEvoy & Dean, and other supporters say expanding the city’s boundaries is key to attracting good jobs, opponents such as Janice Wiles of Friends of Frederick County (right) worry about the impact of that expansion on schools, fire protection and other public services.

Point: The City of Frederick needs more land.

Bruce Dean – McEvoy & Dean

Washington-Baltimore is one of the few areas of the country expected to grow tremendously in the next 10 to 20 years. The fact is, growth is the reality. Annexing land located just outside of the city, to the north, for employment and mixed uses has been part of the long-term plans both for Frederick County and the city for years and years.

These annexations along U.S. 15 satisfy a specific, demonstrated city need — for large parcels of undeveloped land to accommodate large new employers seeking a campus-like environment. When completed, these annexations are expected to add between 7,000 and 8,000 good, white-collar jobs and will contribute significantly to the tax base. Creating places for this type of jobs so that more people can work here instead of traveling down I-270 for work is good for Frederick and its citizens.

For the people who oppose the annexations, I don’t think there’s much of an alternative plan beyond ‘no growth.’ To my knowledge, they’ve not recommended alternate locations for the type of large office campuses that the city needs to accommodate future growth and provide residents with opportunities to work, live and recreate in the city. The big thing that keeps coming up is traffic, that this annexation will make traffic worse.

If Frederick tries to keep people out, it won’t stop the growth — it’ll just push it farther out, to Pennsylvania, to Washington County, to West Virginia — and people will drive through here and the roads will still be clogged. The alternative, which I favor, and which is consistent with the Smart Growth principles that are so widely embraced in this state, is to provide places for people to work and live in Frederick at locations, such as these annexation sites, that can be efficiently served with public water and sewer facilities.

Counterpoint: We cannot grow our way out of our problems.

Janice Wiles – Friends of Frederick County

These annexations will raise our taxes, congest our roads and either overcrowd our schools or drain our personal coffers to pay for a new school. For the past two decades the sprawl development model has consumed more than 14 million acres of land in the U.S. and vastly changed the land around us in Frederick County. We cannot grow our way out of problems and in fact will create new problems. Not only does development on such scale fragment and destroy wildlife habitat, pollute our streams and pave over rich and productive farmland, it has a direct impact on our lives by creating more traffic.

Citizens are demanding a more common sense approach to growth that preserves open spaces, natural resources and farmland, promotes local businesses, and fosters modes of transportation that do not clog our roadways. Already inadequate and highly congested, and doing double duty as a local road for Frederick residents, U.S. 15 is one of the most dangerous roads in Maryland. The northern annexations will add 12,000 to 15,000 car trips per day to Route 15 and arterial roads.

Instead of annexed land that can be home to major employment campuses for large, Fortune 500 companies such as Bechtel, IBM, MedImmune, State Farm, and the like, Friends of Frederick County promotes local economic growth, based as much as possible on using our local goods and services. We imagine Frederick County’s urban areas and political leaders working together to learn to build our community assets incorporating sustainable agriculture, green building, renewable energy, community capital, zero-waste manufacturing and independent retail — all vital components of a “sustainable community.”

There is no evidence to support the claims that the Fortune 500 corporations would employ local Frederick residents. Meanwhile, studies such as www.livingeconomies.org show that by supporting local owned businesses – ones that can fit into the millions of square feet of office space available in Frederick City – we can also create jobs without compromising the environment.

Republished from 270 Inc Business Magazine.