(10/2022) The Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance, or APFO, is a document that was created in 1998 to ensure that our Frederick County schools, roads, and other public facilities serving a proposed development, will be adequate for the existing community after the development is built. It is meant to keep school classrooms from becoming too crowded, roads from becoming too congested, and to make sure there will be sufficient sewer capacity and water supply. The APFO is codified as Chapters 1-20 Adequate Public Facilities in the Frederick County Code.
There have been several amendments to the APFO over the years. Fellow Council Member Steve McKay has been working on amendments for the past three years. APFOs can be very complicated, and he wants to get it just right. Bill Number 22-17 is an act to "Amend the Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance by strengthening traffic mitigation standards, increasing the requirements to be considered a "limited impact development," revising aspects of the Planning Commission’s approval authority, revising approval time periods, and removing or revising out of date language." As of this writing, the bill Council Member McKay is proposing will have a public hearing on Monday, October 3rd beginning at 7 pm.
The previous version of this bill was introduced by Council Member Steve McKay and co-sponsored by Council Member Kai Hagen on May 30. Following review and comments from the Planning Commission and comments made during the Council’s public hearing, they attempted to formulate a compromise. The compromise would still strengthen the proposed level of service (LOS) standard, while not creating a prohibitive standard for nonresidential development. Facing the 90-day deadline for bill passage, they were unable to formulate this compromise in time. They opted to withdraw the bill and reintroduce it in a modified form. In this modified version of the bill, they incorporated most of the Planning Commission’s recommendations, and made other changes to attempt to meet the Planning Commission "in the middle."
The part of this bill that I believe is most important is Strengthening Traffic Standards. The following information is from Council Member McKay’s Briefing Memo. "The more stringent LOS mitigation standard in the original bill was a subject of concern both from public comment and from the Planning Commission. The revised bill addresses these concerns in two ways. First, the threshold for applying the higher mitigation standard has been raised from 50 peak hour trips to 100. This means that more of the smaller developments will still be able mitigate to the current LOS standard. Second, for larger developments that exceed the 100 peak hour trip threshold, they have provided the Planning Commission with the authority to modify the mitigation standard to the current LOS "E" standard if two criteria are met: (1) the development is within a growth area and (2) it is served by regularly scheduled public transportation.
The public transportation criteria is the new feature here that distinguishes this bill from the current ordinance. Not all of our growth areas are served by public transportation.
Public transportation is important to offset the demands on our roadways created by new development. For this reason, they believed that new development in growth areas served by public transportation can rely on the current LOS mitigation standard. Under this bill, the Planning Commission will have the authority to make this happen."
The proposed bill also addresses several other areas of concern, including, reducing the duration of APFO approvals, bicycle and pedestrian facilities, and other revisions to the Planning Commissions authority.
I believe this bill will provide for better managed and controlled growth not only in District 5 but for Frederick County as a whole.
