Anne Arundel County Executive Stuart Pittman is looking to expand the county’s adequate public facilities (APF) requirements to include bicycle, pedestrian and transit infrastructure.
Pittman has introduced Council Bill 81-25, which would replace the existing Bicycle, Pedestrian and Transit Assessment (BPTA) with an expanded APF test and mitigation requirements that would go beyond traffic to include those other modes of transportation.
The multimodal approach to APF would require new development and some tenant improvement /redevelopment projects to build or improve bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure to meet minimum “stress comfort levels.” Transit systems would also have to meet access and service frequency requirements.
The multimodal APF test mitigation and fee requirements fall outside of the county’s existing impact fee structure and would represent additional costs and obligations as a condition of development approval. The bill proposes removing the cost cap that limits fees and the exemption for small commercial and residential projects in the current BPTA.
Although multimodal testing guidance has not been completed, the county is proposing that mitigation be determined by census tract data regarding the share of travel trips taken by transit, bicycle and on foot. Because the proposed methodology does not base mitigation of trip generation by building type, it produces unrealistically high mitigation fee amounts that are generally four times more than the cost of offsetting road impacts.
The bill was the subject of pointed questioning by members of the Anne Arundel County Council at a work session on October 14th. The bill will be the subject of a public hearing on October 20th.
For more information on the legislation and the NAIOP Maryland working group that is engaged on the bill, please contact Tom Ballentine, Vice President for Policy at tom.ballentine@naiop-md.org.