Developer woes fail to impress

County turns down most hardship requests

Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2008

The recent economic downturn has been tough on local housing developers, and changes made to Charles County's development laws in June have made things even tougher.

However, the county commissioners were not buying every hard luck tale that came across their desk last week.

When the commissioners strengthened the county's Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance this summer and significantly tightened the amount of school capacity available for new development, they included a provision that allowed developers to apply for exemptions, based on hardships caused by the law.

Seven projects applied for hardship exemptions during the 60-day period following the law's adoption. Last week, the commissioners agreed to approve two of the requests, but hesitated on the other five.

The commissioners agreed that the Davenleigh and Quicktree projects, located in Bryantown's T.C. Martin Elementary School district, would have been scheduled to receive 30 school seat allocations between them this July had the law not changed. Since the two projects did not have previously obtained allocations that were allowed to expire, the commissioners agreed that the projects did suffer a hardship from the law change.

Two other hardship applications for Hunters Brooke in Mason Springs and Sunridge in Waldorf gave the commissioners pause, because both projects had previously acquired school allocations, but those allocations have expired.

Three other projects — East Acres in Bryantown, Falcon Ridge in Mason Springs and Beuchart's Inheritance in La Plata — were not even scheduled to receive allocations in July.

"It appears that the list that came to us were [hardships] that were going on for months and months," observed commissioners' President F. Wayne Cooper (D). He and Commissioner Gary V. Hodge (D) both noted that the hardships listed by the latter five projects were not directly caused by the law change.

"I wouldn't want my remarks to be interpreted as a lack of sympathy," Hodge said.

"I don't feel we should turn a blind eye to projects that are also impacted," said Commissioner Edith J. Patterson.

The commissioners voted to approve the first two hardship requests, and asked staff to gather more information on the other projects' problems.

Charles County government has had it with its adventure in open-source software.

Widely loathed by county employees and customers alike, the government's free Open Office software suite is on its way out.

"It's working, but it's not without its pitfalls and problems, especially when working [with people] outside of county government," said fiscal director Debra Hudson of Open Office.

In May, County Administrator Paul W. Comfort received permission from the commissioners to convert the county's computers back to Microsoft Office.

Comfort estimated that the county will have to invest a little over $290,000 to return to the familiar arms of Ma Gates, a figure significantly lower than his preliminary estimate of $416,000.

Comfort said he originally estimated that the county would need 640 licenses at a cost of $650 each. However, he discovered that only 477 employees actually use the productivity suite for their day-to-day work, and his staff managed to get the licenses for $609 each. The county switched to Open Office about a year ago to avoid paying the licensing fees to the software giant. Employees have been begging to go back to Microsoft ever since.