Once a month, in a back room at the St. Mary’s County Department of Land Use and Growth Management (LUGM), a group of developers, and other representatives of the development community, meet with several high-ranking County officials to discuss and offer recommendations on how they want the Zoning Ordinance and other land use documents crafted and revised.
This group calls themselves the Development Review Forum (DRF), and was formed by the St. Mary’s Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) in 1996 to help streamline a once convoluted development review process. It has since morphed into a somewhat discrete quasi-planning commission. They work behind the scenes and tend to avoid the limelight. For example, there is currently a recommendation before the BOCC to allow a higher concentration of residential development in areas of the County zoned Office Business Park (OBP). This recommendation went before both the Planning Commission and the BOCC, and the participation of the DRF was never mentioned. Developer members of the DRF, and their lawyers, testified before both panels in favor of the OBP revision, but according to the meeting minutes, never identified themselves as members of the DRF or of having a hand in the creation of the recommended changes. Two of the DRF members that worked on the OBP amendment own property zoned OBP.
Shocked yet? It gets better. DRF By-Laws call for the forum to be made up of representatives of the development community (residential, commercial, engineering, and planning), County department heads (LUGM, DPT, METCOM, Soil Conservation, Health, and SMECO), and citizens with no direct ties to the developers or the County departments represented.
The most recent addition to the DRF is local developer attorney Bill McKissick. If his name sounds familiar, its probably because he’s the attorney who represented the developer who brought us First Colony, and just last week, he brought a record $24,000,000 lawsuit against the County on behalf of his client, Marcas LLC, the developer for the planned Challenger Estates.
Six weeks ago, the BOCC appointed Bill McKissick to fill the role of “Citizen with no direct ties to the development community or County departments” on the Development Review Forum.
Because of its high demand on County staff, the DRF is the most expensive committee St. Mary’s County has. No other County board, including the Planning Commission and the Zoning Board of Appeals, has more direct influence over County officials regarding land use and growth management policy. The DRF is truly the backdoor to County Government, and its wide open to developers.
If the St. Mary’s BOCC, led by newly elected County Commissioner President Jack Russell, is ever going to get a handle on out-of-control growth in St. Mary’s County, they’re going to have to start by disbanding the DRF and locking the back door.