Gov. Wes Moore’s housing legislation aims to pressure counties into more quickly approving housing projects in areas where jobs outnumber available housing units. (Photo by Tech. Sgt. Austen R. Adriaens/Air National Guard)
The clock is ticking on Gov. Wes Moore’s bill to expedite housing development in the state, a proposal that county officials have warned has substantive issues and will need “significant” work before they can get behind it.
But nobody’s saying it’s a lost cause yet.
“There is a lot of interest in this bill. We know we need to invest in housing infrastructure,” Del. Robbyn Lewis (D-Baltimore City) said Friday. “It’s not over until it’s over.”
The bill she’s talking about it the “Housing for Jobs Act,” which has both a House and Senate version. The bills look at a region’s “jobs-to-housing” ratio and press local governments to expedite approval of housing projects in those areas where there are 1.5 jobs for every available housing unit.
In areas with such a “regional housing infrastructure gap,” local governments would be expected to automatically approve new housing developments, unless county officials can prove the project would negatively impact the area. The goal of the bill is to essentially “default to ‘yes’ on housing proposals,” Housing Secretary Jake Day said at a recent bill hearing.
Moore — who testified in person on March 4 before both the House Environment and Transportation Committee and the Senate Education, Energy and Environment Committee — said the legislation is intended to build off of his housing package last year, which aimed to build the state’s housing supply amid an estimated 96,000-unit shortage.
His plan this year will “give builders greater certainty when it comes to planning and executing projects, and we are taking these steps without heavy-handed preemption,” Moore said in his testimony.
‘Serious concerns … unintended consequences’
But members of the Maryland Association of Counties have “serious concerns” with the bill’s language and say that it needs major amendments before the association can support it — which it wants to do.
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MACo First Vice President M.C. Keegan-Ayer said at the bill’s initial hearing in the Senate on March 4 that the governor’s office refused to have a meeting with the association on legislation until after the bill was introduced to committee. When MACo finally saw the bill’s language mid-February, it found “substantive” issues that raise “serious concerns and … we believe, unintended consequences,” Keegan-Ayer said.
One concern is the legal challenge aspect of the bill, which says developers can sue counties that are not in compliance with the law. Keegan-Ayer said the bill could accidentally “create perverse incentives” for job growth initiatives.
“If we’re bringing in more businesses, if we create new jobs … even while we are trying to build housing as quickly as possible given the interest rates and what the building industry is able to bear, we may be penalized by this bill for having a disproportionate number of jobs in relation to the number of housing units,” Keegan-Ayer said.
Dominic Butchko, MACo’s director of intergovernmental relations, said it’s like the state “holding a metaphorical gun to a county’s head, saying approve this or you will be sued within a year.”
MACo is also concerned about school density issues. Under the bill, a county could deny a project if the local school and neighboring schools are at or above 100% of capacity. Otherwise, the county would be expected to approve the project, the bill says.
Butchko reiterated that concern at a meeting Monday of the the House Environment and Transportation’s Land Use and Ethics Subcommittee, which Lewis chairs.
“We [counties] cannot reset the lines of who can go to what classroom. We sign the check for the school district and that is where that relationship ends,” Butchko said.
“What this provision says is if you have a school district that is at 100%, but you have neighboring school districts that are not at 100%, the county can’t deny that project then,” he said. “You’re still going to see that overburdened classroom in that district.”
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There is an out for counties. They could deny housing proposals if they can show by “clear and convincing evidence” that a project would negatively impact the community. The bill lists other justifications for denial, including health and safety considerations, inadequate water or wastewater systems, a price tag too high for the county, or conflict with federal or state law, among others.
‘We’re still talking’
Sen. Brian Feldman (D-Montgomery), who chairs the Education, Energy, and the Environment Committee, said that he plans to meet with Environment and Transportation Chair Del. Marc Korman (D-Montgomery) and the administration soon to “assess if there is traction to move” the bill out of committee.
Korman agreed earlier this week that the lack of momentum on the legislation did not mean the bill was down for the count, with crossover day on Monday.
“If you look at last year, the governor’s housing bill, we didn’t pass that before crossover. It was fine,” Korman said Monday. “It’s important to the governor. We’re going to give it due attention and care.”
Committee leaders say that some “complicated” bills — such as the governor’s priority housing legislation — can still be in play, even if they blow past the crossover deadline.
“For some of these bigger bills, crossover is not a major factor,” Feldman said Friday.
Butchko said MACo is “very interested in cooperating with the state where we can,” but there are “a lot of gaps” between the bill’s intended goal and how the current language would be implemented.
Michael Sanderson, executive director for MACo, said that part of the delay in moving Moore’s housing bill is due to the lack of communication between the administration and MACo.
“We were talking in November and January at the concept level. But as for, ‘Here’s the bill, let’s talk about what’s in the bill’ — we ended up not really having a real exchange on that stuff until the time of the hearing,” Sanderson said Friday. “It’s OK … but it’s part of the reason why we’re on overtime on this bill, because we didn’t get a chance to work through the text of the bill until the middle of February.”
But Sanderson said both sides are talking now.
“I think when they heard the things we were concerned about, I think everyone around the table felt like the deeply held principles aren’t really the conflict here. It’s the specifics of, ‘How do you write this?’” he said.
Despite the serious concerns raised in the committee and subcommittee meetings, Sanderson said MACo is interested in continuing discussions further.
“For what it’s worth, process-wise, I think everybody involved has sort of shook hands that this is a bill that has a chance to pass — even if it misses crossover, which it most certainly will,” Sanderson said. “With normal bills it’s like, ‘OK those bills are dead’ – in this case we’re still talking.”