A Christian church is pursuing its religious discrimination lawsuit against Anne Arundel after the county rejected a settlement to allow the church to build a school in a rural community.
“The church has been left with no choice but to move forward with the litigation where the evidence will show that the county’s treatment of the church has been, and remains, discriminatory,” said Cathy Willis, operations director for Riverdale Baptist Church Ministries, in a written statement Monday.
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Riverdale Baptist, headquartered in Prince George’s County, is trying to build a 92,000-square-foot private school for its Arundel Bay Christian Academy, which is operating in cramped modular buildings in the Lothian-Bristol neighborhood, church officials said.
The new school site is about a mile from the current school and is situated among horse farms along narrow, winding roads.
But the Anne Arundel County Council rejected a settlement deal Dec. 15, leading the church to re-open its lawsuit filed more than a year ago.
Claims of local governments discriminating against churches have emerged in Maryland in the past two years.
The Court of Appeals recently sided with a Baltimore County zoning code prohibiting a church from building a massive sign. Prince George’s earlier this year had to pay $3.8 million for denying a water system upgrade to a desired location for a new church. And another church unsuccessfully sued Calvert County for claims of religious discrimination in its planning methods.
Anne Arundel changed the zoning in 2005 and twice denied permits to build the school. Riverdale Baptist then filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Baltimore under a new federal law prohibiting governments from using zoning tools to discriminate against religious establishments.
“There were other projects that have moved forward, but they targeted the school to make sure it was not approved,” said Riverdale Baptist attorney Rob Showers. “You can’t prove in a person’s mind that they are acting in a discriminatory way, but actions speak louder.”
The church and Anne Arundel officials hammered out a deal to give Riverdale Baptist an exemption, but it needed approval from the County Council, which the church said was guaranteed by County Attorney Jonathan Hodgson.
“On the basis of such repeated assurances, the church continued to … expend significant efforts and funds on engineering [and] designing,” Willis said in her statement.
But the council, after a month of debate, rejected the deal, saying the school would create dangerous traffic on the neighborhood’s windy roads and pose environmental problems with the nearby Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary.
“The attitude was never about discrimination, and the discussion both behind closed doors and in the public session was always about appropriate land use,” said Council Chairman Ed Reilly, R-Crofton, who represents the area and had sponsored the settlement legislation before voting against it Dec. 15.
Hodgson said he never made concrete assurances, though he did try to convince the council during public hearings to support the settlement for fear of a multi-million dollar loss if unsuccessful in court.
Riverdale Baptist’s allegations strike “me as an attempt by those who make decisions for the church to shift responsibility for their current situation away from themselves and onto others,” Hodgson said Monday.
