SALISBURY – Wicomico County officials have devised a plan that will address tier map designation issues that were brought to the county’s attention in recent weeks.
In an open work session of the Wicomico County Council this week, Sharptown Mayor and Commission President Doug Gosnell met with councilmembers and Keith Hall of the Department of Planning, Zoning and Community Development to address and fix opposing tier map distinctions before the county’s comprehensive plan is adopted.
According to Gosnell, Sharptown officials submitted changes to the jurisdiction’s water and sewer plan in 2013, which reflected their future plans to serve water and sewer to a section of land adjacent to town. This tier II growth designation would make the land, as he described, “untouchable” to those who wanted to build on separate septic systems.
But as a result of administrative changes during that time, Hall said the plans didn’t get finalized. Instead of the area being labeled tier II by the jurisdiction, the county had it labeled as a tier III growth area in the preliminary growth maps, meaning that growth on separate septic systems are allowed.
“At the end of last week, President Gosnell reached out to the planning and zoning staff and expressed some concerns about some conflicts between what we were designating as one tier and what the town was designating as another tier,” Hall said.
He explained that the county’s approach to designate the land as tier III is to offer property owners some flexibility.
“Our approach is, until a municipality has expressed a degree of certainty moving forward that they plan to serve these designated growth areas adjacent to their town, we want to leave flexibility for the county property owner,” he said.
Gosnell said he was not aware that the county had labeled the area a tier III designation on the preliminary maps until county representatives contacted him in recent months, asking about his satisfaction with the town’s comprehensive plan.
“This issue here, I think, is unfair to Sharptown,” Gosnell told the council in a public comment portion of the meeting. “If you look at our comp plan, our water and sewer plan and everything else, it’s the same. There is no change to it. We didn’t propose any tremendous areas. We just took a little bit of land outside of our growth area, what we call our growth area, and that’s it.”
Hall told the council it was not uncommon for projects of this nature to require what he called “fine tuning” in the remaining stages.
To address Gosnell’s concerns, Hall and his staff suggested that any jurisdiction with pending applications for water and sewer expansion at the time the county comprehensive plan is adopted will have the town’s changes reflected in the county’s adopted growth tier maps.
“Therefore, in this specific example, areas we have defined as tier III in Sharptown moving forward, will be amended and identified as tier II,” he said.
Hall added that applications to amend the county-wide water and sewer plan must first go through the county council and then through the state for approval, a process which could take six to nine months.
“If it should come back that it’s not approved, we recommend going back to the comp plan and adjusting the tier map accordingly,” he said, adding that the county would revert back to its original map with a tier III distinction.
Both parties agreed to the suggestions at hand, and Hall added that he would let other jurisdictions know.
