The Baltimore City Council is on the verge of approving a zoning bill that would allow large property owners to seek variances to almost every provision of the city zoning code.

Scheduled for approval tonight, Council Bill 25-0006 would give businesses, educational institutions, hospitals and developers, among others, great latitude to seek exceptions from current zoning rules, such as a limit on the number of fuel pumps at a gasoline station or a guarantee of public access to the harbor.

The legislation “empowers” Zoning Administrator Geoffrey Veale and the Board of Municipal and Zoning Appeals (BMZA) to review and approve a variance application “to any provision with the Zoning Code” outside of signage regulations, according to an explanatory note in the bill.

• Bill 25-0006 was passed unanimously and without debate by the Council tonight and will go to Mayor Scott, whose approval, as an administration bill, is assured.

“This means that if a gas station owner doesn’t like that he’s limited to eight pumps, he will now be able to ask for a variance for, say, 10 pumps,” says Joan Floyd, a community activist who specializes in zoning issues.

Despite its broad sweep, the bill has been presented by the Brandon Scott administration as a series of technical “modifications . . . to confirm to state law” and “clarifying provisions” related to non-conforming structures.

To Reduce Inequity

The administration says the changes will update a code that was last changed in 2017 and reduce long-established patterns of inequity in neighborhoods by clarifying how non-conforming structures may be changed or expanded.

“It’s nothing of the sort,” says Floyd, who said the bill should have been vetted by community groups rather than approved by administrative bodies largely controlled by the mayor.

“It boils down to this: Developers are not happy with the level of regulation in the code regarding setbacks, height, bulk  and the like. So they and their allies in the administration have come up with clever ways to get rid of them, substituting in their place open-ended language that allows variances to be requested and approved.”

“It boils down to this: Developers are not happy with the level of regulation in the code”  – Joan Floyd.

Approved by the BMZA and the Planning Commission, the bill whisked through the Council’s Land Use and Transportation Committee, chaired by Councilman Ryan Dorsey, with a few amendments.

Six of the seven committee members endorsed the bill, with 11th District Councilman Zac Blanchard absent.

The original bill called on comprehensive rezoning reviews to be conducted yearly by the Planning Commission, which is now chaired by Jon Laria,  a retired land-use lawyer for Kevin Plank, Michael Beatty and other prominent developers.

Floyd said that annual reviews would subject neighborhoods in popular city districts to constant changes in zoning. Luckily, she said, the provision died in committee.

But because the final bill does not spell out the types of regulations under which variances would never be granted, “it does not require much imagination to think up the kinds of variance requests that will be made in the future,” she testified to Dorsey’s committee last month.