After months of debate, the parties fighting over a development proposal in rural Baltimore County reached an agreement Wednesday.
But one northern land-preservation group vowed to continue fighting plans for 20 new homes and four athletic fields in Freeland, despite the compromise between the local developer and community association. Reb Scavone, president of the 50-member Freeland Legacy Alliance, said the agreement was insufficient and “not properly done.”
“We will continue fighting it,” Scavone said. “The entire project is at odds with what we think should be there.”
The developer agreed to scrap plans for a 32,000-square-foot indoor recreation facility, reduced six ball fields to four, minimized new roads and cut a 600-space parking lot in half, said J. Carroll Holzer, an attorney representing the Freeland Community Association. In exchange, the community agreed to move one lot and add another to land reserved for rural conservation.
“The reduction of the indoor fields, the lot and the road space meant that the impact on the streams would be significantly less,” Holzer said. “I think it?s a fantastic settlement.”
Overall, 110 acres will remain in conservation, according to Barbara Cochran, legal liaison to the community association, which fought the plans on grounds that the indoor athletic complex did not constitute open space as approved by county Deputy Zoning Commissioner John Murphy.
That decision will be rendered moot under the agreement, Cochran said, and the association is pushing for laws that preclude land zoned for rural conservation from open space requirements.
That would help the association avoid similar battles in the future, she said.
“Obviously, people would like all the farms to remain as farms,” Cochran said. “However, most people who live up here live on land that used to be a farm. Hopefully, the scope of the growth is limited.”
