(10/2019) The Livable Frederick Master Plan took several years and was developed at a cost of thousands of staff hours and hundreds of thousands of tax dollars. State law requires every county to have a comprehensive plan covering the broad strokes of what type of zoning should go where, where the county should grow, what areas should get water and sewer etc... Livable Frederick is a comprehensive plan on steroids. It is an ambitious attempt to plan Frederick County for the next several decades on areas that are not usually included in land use planning including hundreds of action plans for increasing arts consumption, education on food history and preparation, preventing domestic violence, stopping bullying and suicide, increasing early childhood education, adding job training, and more.

The Council heard testimony on select narrow parts of the plan, largely from people interested in a specific subject or two but not much on whether broadening a comprehensive land-use plan to cover all aspects of life is a good idea for a locality. That we did not hear much general feedback on this plan is not surprising; it is a densely filled 200 page document, and most people who work and go about living their lives are not interested in parsing such a long, convoluted government document.

I kept an open mind listening and learning about the plan and the process. I respect many of the goals and the vision that this document portrays. Many of the goals are things that no one would oppose (i.e. creating job growth through innovation). However, after reviewing the final document, I could not support the document as a whole. The document expands the scope of local government into nearly every aspect of our lives. Conservatively, I have counted at least 26 individual calls for new regulation at the local level, many of which call for more revenue and more spending through new government programs.

The plan calls for such things as a ‘road diet’ potentially reducing lanes. The plan calls for new local revenues for things like ‘historic preservation, creation of viewshed easements, and implementation of agricultural impact assessments. While the aim of some of these ideas is not in and of itself bad, these programs would require increased local revenues through taxes and fees.

Even more concerning to me is that the plan sets the table for new regulation that will raise the cost of both living in Frederick and providing services to the citizens. Goals such as promoting new construction materials in housing, construction of green homes, construction of green public buildings, factoring in an environmental review of county purchases, creating infrastructure to preserve wildlife, and a complete streets environmental policy will all add to the growing costs associated with providing services and living in Frederick County.

There are multiple calls within the document to increase housing density in Frederick County for many reasons including to promote transit and transit oriented development. There is a heavy emphasis on increasing environmental regulation with calls to add local regulations on air pollution, green buildings, adopting a green construction code, and review of all ordinances regularly to enhance their environmental strength. Environmental consciousness is an admirable goal, but we must balance that against other important values such as property rights, competing funding priorities, affordable housing, and economic development. It would be too easy for a government body to rely on this document as a basis for virtually any type of future regulation or law restricting property rights or increasing taxes or fees in the name of the environmental ‘climate crisis’ referenced within or within the many other broadly defined action plans which generally relate to increasing regulatory burdens on Frederick County residents.

We have entered a new phase of local government land use planning with a greatly expanded view of the roles and responsibilities for government . Philosophically, I have always said that local government should focus its resources on service delivery for the basics of government (public safety, education, parks, roads, etc…), and my concern is that with this document, we have gotten too far afield.