Tuesday, March 31, 2009

County Executive Budgets for Route 40 Design Manual

We have been talking in this space for many months about the need for comprehensive commercial zoning and design planning in Howard County. This has been talked about in the context of Marc Norman's charge to take Council Bill 58 to referendum. The battle over how best to achieve holistic commercial zoning in the County has spilled over to the Letter to the Editor pages of County publications, including a back and forth between myself and former Council member Angela Beltram.

It looks like the discussion is paying dividends. County Executive Ken Ulman is proposing $100,000 in the budget for a consultant to draft a Route 40 Design Manual. Council member Courtney Watson engaged Ulman and the DPZ to compel Ulman to decide that an outside consultant should be brought in to write the manual. This is exactly the kind of thing I have been calling for all along and I'm very pleased to see that it may well make the final cut of the budget.

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