Opinion
Street Level
The fastest way to lose Maryland’s forests is not a three-building apartment complex in Waldorf. It is the slow spread of big lots across the countryside, one rezoning at a time, while the places we have designated for growth sit underbuilt.
That is the backdrop for the first test of the state’s revised Forest Conservation Act. A developer, PECS Development, wants to put three multifamily buildings and a community building on a 2.88-acre wooded parcel off Old Washington Road. The site sits in Charles County’s development district and priority funding area, in the Waldorf urban redevelopment corridor and in a federal opportunity zone, the developer’s attorney, Sue Greer, told the county planning commission, according to the Southern Maryland Chronicle. Charles County adopted an affordable housing plan a year ago, and this is the kind of project that plan was written to produce.
To meet its replanting obligation, the developer wants to cover 60% through credits for protected forest elsewhere and pay a fee for the rest. The law, as amended by Senate Bill 526, allows 50% by default and up to 60% with justification, public comment and approval from the Department of Natural Resources.
My colleague Juniper Hale argues in this space today that the state should hold the line at 50%. Her case deserves a serious answer. The parcel is mapped as priority urban forest in a Tier II high-quality watershed, and offsite credits preserve forest that already exists rather than planting new trees. Those are fair points. But the better conclusion is that Maryland should approve this request and write the lesson into the rules.
Count the land, not just the trees
Start with what the alternative usually looks like. Last month, across the river, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved 13 single-family homes on the nearly 6.5-acre Wolf Trap Nursery site on Leesburg Pike, at a density of 1.97 homes per acre with lots averaging 12,400 square feet, FFXnow reported. No one spoke against it. The utility hookup alone will remove nine major trees, and the developer pledged $10,000 to the county’s tree fund to offset the loss.
That is a normal, legal, uncontroversial project, and it uses more than twice the land of Eagle Point. Multiply that pattern across a region and you get the forest loss that worries environmentalists. Every household that finds an apartment in a growth corridor is a household that is not buying a new lot at the edge.
The forest law already recognizes this. Under the revised act, multifamily projects with 25 or more units and transit-oriented development may reforest at a quarter-acre per acre removed, or mitigate through preservation at a half-acre per acre, according to a Maryland Forest Service overview. Forests in a priority funding area that are not in a priority retention area get a lower reforestation ratio, too. Lawmakers clearly meant to steer development toward places like Waldorf’s corridor. The 60% option exists for cases like this one.
The county is not short of forest
Charles County ranks third in Maryland for forest acreage, behind Garrett and Allegany, with about 164,600 forested acres, according to the county’s 2022 land preservation and parks plan, as cited at last week’s hearing by Waldorf resident Tim Lesnar. Protecting the best of those acres through retention banks is not nothing. It is how a county keeps large, connected forest, the kind that matters for wildlife and for the Chesapeake’s tributaries, while letting its town centers grow up.
Ms. Hale is right that credits are not new trees, and right that Charles County has no planting banks, which is why the rest of the obligation would go to a fee, the county planner said. The fix for that is to build planting capacity, not to make the first affordable apartment project wait. Mr. Lesnar also warned that the new rules will weigh heaviest on small property owners, who may need a lawyer, an engineer, review fees and mitigation purchases to build on a single parcel. Every one of those costs ends up in rent.
Write the growth corridor into the rules
The county’s planning staff will bring an update of Charles County’s forest ordinance to the planning commission on Nov. 16. Here is what it should do. Make the 60% offsite share routine, not exceptional, for multifamily housing in priority funding areas and designated growth corridors. Require that fee money go to a planting bank in the same county, so the trees come back. And pair every infill project with street trees, which shade the sidewalks people actually walk.
The District offers a model for that last piece. Its Tree Preservation Enhancement Amendment Act, effective this May, steers Tree Fund money to planting on public space, parks and school grounds and to subsidies for residents replacing hazardous trees. A city can grow denser and greener at once when tree money follows the homes.
Maryland’s net-gain promise is a good one. Keeping it means saving forests where forests are, and building homes where homes belong. Eagle Point is the second kind of place. Approve it.
Leah Okonkwo-Hart is the pen name of a Washington Inquisitor opinion columnist writing from a New Urbanist perspective. The views expressed are the author’s own and not those of The Washington Inquisitor.
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