Update to article: As a result of the update to the zoning code, effective Dec 2008, Harford County does now have a TDR program. It is poorly structured, sacrificing AG land outside a Priority Preservation Area for land in that area. The County Council, while recognizing its flawed nature, considered it too hard to fix in the time available. The article is still worth reading, if we are to ever fix the TDR program.
Contrary to numerous statements about Harford County’s “TDR Program” Harford County has no Transfer of Development Rights program. Since 1982, when Harford County changed Agricultural zoning density from one unit per three acres to one unit per ten acres, the Administration and the usual spokesmen of local Agriculture agreed on an ordinance allowing owners to transfer development rights from their property to an adjacent property or within 500 feet, so that an owner could derive cash income from sale of this right instead of using that right on his or her own acreage and thus losing productive farmland.
Robert Lynch was Planning Director then and spoke on this subject on March 6 at a meeting held at the Highland Center in Street by “Citizens for the Preservation of Agriculture,” a band of farmland owners throughout this county who voluntarily joined one of the three programs to preserve farmland and farming. Lynch said the ordinance for moving development rights from one parcel to an adjacent one or within 500 feet was all they could foresee and agree on in 1982; it was not a “program,” because it had no rules for Sending and Receiving Areas. They did not anticipate, he said, that anyone would try to move development rights a long distance, the so-called “hopscotching” whereby someone assembles development rights from individual properties and moves them, temporarily, onto adjacent properties until they land on a property to be developed [as described in Lane Harvey Brown’s Sun article of February 23, 2003].
There are many TDR programs in the U.S.A. , and a few in Maryland, most notably in Montgomery and Calvert Counties. First these local governments tried to plan specifically where land should be preserved for farming, open space, public reservoir protection, transportation corridors, and outdoor recreation, and designated them as “Sending Areas.” These counties also planned for areas that could and should receive various kinds of development, commercial, industrial, institutional, and residential of various densities, because public facilities already existed, or were planned to accommodate growth, and thus became “Receiving Areas.” These types of land-uses required certain numbers of development rights to implement the general plans. Developers would purchase the needed rights from Sending Areas for whatever prices the owners in the Sending Areas negotiated with them to get.
Harford County could have done this with its “Development Envelope, the now familiar inverted T zone in which 75% of this county’s new development was supposed to occur. By land-use zoning the lands in that area, the County created wealth for the owners there but not for the owners outside that zone. Every time the County Council rezones property it creates wealth for the owners. The developers, the buyers of land, must pay the seller’s price created by zoning, because they have to build within those zones. Note: I think you really mean increased density or usage zoning which we call up-zoning rather than any rezoning. The property across from Country Life farm comes to mind - in the last comp.rez, they were successful in downzoning to AG. In a real TDR Program, the developer would purchase the required number of development rights in Sending Areas, at the lowest possible prices, and move them to the Receiving Area for their projects. Thus, they would be paying less money for their development rights, and owners in any of the Sending Areas could consider whether to sell rights to them and for what prices. Obviously, there would be many more potential sellers of rights, many of whom probably would hold out until a developer offered a higher price.
It is impossible now for this County Council to have the political will and support to do the planning for a TDR program here, even if it had the skills needed. The fact remains, however, that the Harford County Council has the sole authority to zone and rezone land. The hopscotching form of TDR allowed by recent Administrations removes that authority from the County Council and gives it away to owners and developers who concentrate development rights in Agricultural areas, where the density is supposed to be one unit per ten acres, and allow them to develop at higher, de facto densities. The Sun item mentioned above gives examples, such as the Houzouris property, which had six lots platted and now would have fifteen, or a density of about one unit per four acres. Thus the Administration allows the developers to rezone property without the review and decision of the County Council. Nobody has lost “rights;” just the County Council has given up its right and responsibility to legislate rules for land use.
This is not an issue for a few isolated areas. The brouhaha generated by Lance Miller’s emergency bill revealed that a great many developers and lawyers are doing this. One such case apparently entails hopscotching development rights from the vicinity of Darlington all the way to Whiteford, occasionally even resting on county-owned lands! If the Council wishes to preserve this TDR ordinance, it could amend it to allow such transfers only where a transfer would not change average density of the parcel, could be used by anyone of the temporary receiving properties, and where it would not settle down adjacent to lands with perpetual conservation easements on them.