Now You Know: We Support Much Needed Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance Reforms

For a long time, we have criticized much of the unplanned development in Baltimore County that is often approved with little or no consideration for already overburdened infrastructure in our communities, especially the overcrowding in our public schools.

Many of these projects have been greenlit due to shortcomings of the Baltimore County Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance (APFO), which we hope will change with new legislation addressing the problem of severely overburdened infrastructure and overcrowded schools.

Baltimore County established an APFO Task Force in August 2020 to study how to enhance development to Baltimore County’s needs, particularly those concerning public school facilities. This task force was a tool that the county utilized to manage appropriate growth in our communities by establishing a process for analyzing proposed development projects and their impacts on public infrastructure.

This infrastructure includes water, sewage line capacities, schools and roads. We believe other factors like hospital bed capacity and public safety response times should also be included.

We have long criticized the APFO for not mandating planned development or analytical studies as prerequisites for approving a development project, which has led to the overcrowding of our schools.

Fox Baltimore reported that 50 Baltimore County Public Schools exceeded 100% student capacity. How are children supposed to learn in overcrowded classrooms with limited school seats? Dundalk High School is at 147% student capacity! Sparrows Point High is right behind it at 130% capacity, and all high schools in the southeastern part of the county have an average student capacity of 121%.

These numbers are staggering, and this problem should have been avoided with the right reforms. However, there is some hope in addressing this major issue.

Recently, the Baltimore County Council introduced new legislation to tackle the issues of development projects that lead to severely overcrowded schools. These reforms seek to set more restrictions on development near public schools.

The first reform introduced to the APFO would change the definition of an overcrowded school. Under the current rules, a school is considered overcrowded if it reaches 115% student capacity. This was a terrible policy to begin with. If a school has 100 seats but has 114 students, then that school is over capacity.

This new reform would ensure that a school is considered over capacity at 100%. No school should ever be above 100% capacity, and no Baltimore County public school student should ever be forced to learn in these conditions.

Another reform this legislation would make, would be to eliminate something called the “adjacency loophole.” The adjacency loophole in the current law allows developers to build projects in already overcrowded school districts as long as one school nearby is below capacity.

This loophole existed in the hope that students would be shifted from overcrowded schools to ones below the capacity limit. However, this was just another lousy policy that had the opposite effect. There was no requirement that students would shift schools.

This loophole enabled schools to exceed capacity and, even worse, remain at high levels of capacity wherever there was going to be development. The elimination of this loophole will make it harder for unplanned development to be approved near a public school that is over capacity.

The legislation will also go a step further in tackling development near overcrowded schools by establishing an Interdepartmental Committee on School Overcrowding that will examine the impact a new development project would have on a school.

It would require that a proposed development receive a school capacity approval from the committee to be approved for building. We have called for reforms of this nature for quite some time. Not adequately planned or studied development can severely impact our traffic patterns, infrastructure, and schools.

Are you tired of the gridlocked traffic in the White Marsh area? We know we are. So, why have hundreds of additional new apartments been sanctioned there despite severe traffic and school capacity concerns?

These factors aren’t currently seriously considered when approving this kind of development.

This is because Baltimore County does not require planned or studied development as prerequisites for approval of a new development project. This is a massive shortfall of the current law that we have been advocating to fix for quite some time.

Although this legislation does not fully resolve the issue, it is a great start to tackle future development that may lead to overcrowding in our communities and schools.

We support Councilman David Marks and others on the Baltimore County Council in their efforts to pass these reforms. We will continue to advocate for smart, planned, studied, and sustainable growth in our communities.

The views expressed in this column reflect the opinions and research of the authors and not necessarily those of The Avenue’s editorial staff.

”Now You Know” is a weekly column written by state delegates Ryan Nawrocki and Kathy Szeliga.