The Montgomery County Planning, Housing and Parks Committee voted unanimously on Dec. 1 to recommend Zoning Text Amendment (ZTA) 25-13, an omnibus update that makes technical clarifications and fixes across the county zoning ordinance.

Committee members said the package contains several targeted changes intended to enable mixed-use redevelopment while protecting existing retail spaces. Miss Nadeau, who walked the committee through the measure, said the RSC (regional shopping center) overlay will no longer require a 1,200,000-square-foot gross-leasable-area threshold to qualify for additional building height at large mall sites (Westfield Montgomery and Westfield Wheaton); the overlay will still require a shopping-center minimum of about 600,000 square feet, she said.

The package also restores a 30% gross floor area cap on household living in the county's employment zones (GR, NR and EOF), reversing an earlier lifting under ZTA 25-03, and clarifies that commercial-to-residential conversions should allow 30% nonresidential area rather than be constrained by a 10% apartment-building definition. "The intent here is to allow more mixed development at these mall sites," Miss Nadeau said.

One of the more discussed provisions addressed outdoor storage of large personal property such as boats, trailers and recreational vehicles. Planning staff warned the draft language could be read to cover personal vehicles parked in driveways. Ben Burber of Montgomery Planning told the committee that, without an explicit exclusion, ordinary driveway parking could be interpreted as noncompliant. "The problem is in the parking section...there is nothing that clearly says one way or the other what you do with parking personal vehicles," Burber said.

Committee members agreed to add a committee recommendation to clarify that the outdoor-storage restriction "does not include" personal vehicles and to ask staff to confirm with the Department of Housing and Community Affairs and the Department of Permitting Services that the wording would not create enforcement conflicts. The committee also approved two technical edits suggested by DPS to replace wording about "licensed/unlicensed/registered/unregistered" vehicles with "legal outdoor storage" and to remove portable storage units (pods) from the outdoor-storage list because those units are regulated as accessory structures under separate code sections.

The committee also ordered minor cleanup edits to remove obsolete cross-references left over from previous ZTAs. All three recommended amendments were approved by the committee by voice vote and the committee recommended forwarding the amended ZTA to the full council.

The measure now goes to full council for consideration; committee members asked staff to confirm enforcement implications with DHCA and DPS before that hearing.