A county decision that delays a planned update to its zoning rules will likely have a minimal impact on College Park's development plans, but upgrades to the policy would still be "very helpful," city planners said.
The Prince George's County Council opted earlier this month to postpone a major revision to its zoning ordinance — which governs how property owners may use their land — after deciding the county could not afford to spend several hundred thousand dollars to have its planning department rewrite its rules, which are decades old.
As it is, the county's zoning ordinance is a 1947-era document saddled with more than six decades of case-by-case amendments, College Park Planning Director Terry Schum said.
"You've got outdated zoning categories, you have an outdated format for looking up the rules and regulations, and you probably could do a lot of streamlining," Schum said.
The state of the zoning rules makes it unnecessarily time-consuming for developers to verify they are following the law, according to F. Hamer Campbell Jr., director of government affairs for the Maryland-National Capital Building Industry Association.
In addition, builders in the county have long been pushing for updates to the cumbersome rules.
"We've always had concerns about the zoning ordinance," Campbell said.
Representatives for the county planning office could not be reached for comment yesterday.
But Schum said those changes wouldn't have a huge impact on the development she is overseeing at the city level, which includes new student housing complexes.
"Obviously, the zoning ordinance will affect College Park, because we fall under it, but will it have a major impact? No," Schum said. But, she added, revising it "is something that I think would overall be very helpful."
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