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Staff briefs Planning Commission on four Maryland planning bills, including "Housing Certainty" review deadlines
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Summary
City planning staff summarized four Maryland bills affecting local planning practice — including HB240 and HB243 on comp plan coordination, SB325 (Maryland Housing Certainty Act) requiring 30-day completeness checks for housing applications and longer vesting for final site plans, and HB1178 adding annexation notification requirements.
Planning staff briefed the Gaithersburg Planning Commission on April 22 about several Maryland bills passed during the recent legislative session that may affect local planning procedures.
Greg, a city staff member, summarized four bills. He said HB240 enhances coordination with the Maryland Department of Planning (MDP) by requiring jurisdictions to notify MDP when they begin a comprehensive zoning plan update and obliging MDP to provide guidance within 60 days. HB243 modernizes the state's comprehensive planning framework and aligns local master plans with newly adopted state planning principles, updating plan elements such as land, transportation, housing, economy, equity, resilience, place and ecology.
On SB325, the Maryland Housing Certainty Act, Greg said the bill "establishes mandated standards and procedures for reviewing housing development projects," including a requirement that staff determine application completeness within 30 days and, if the application is incomplete, notify applicants of deficiencies and provide a general timeline to cure them. He noted the bill also restricts code changes after an application is deemed complete and extends vesting of final site plans to a minimum of five years for housing projects (the city code currently vests final site plans for two years with an optional one-year extension).
Greg also described HB1178, which introduces new notification requirements for municipalities seeking annexations: cities would need to notify the legislative district that will be annexed as well as the current legislative district, although he said the bill "doesn't change our authority or ability to annex land; it just requires us to notify" specified delegates.
Greg told the commission that, as of his morning check, two of the four bills (the ones related to comprehensive plan updates) had been approved by the governor; the remaining two had not yet been signed. He emphasized that until the governor signs those bills they are not law.
Commissioners asked clarifying questions about definitions (for example, what constitutes a "housing project" under SB325) and staff noted the bills include specific definitions that limit some provisions to residential projects. The briefing was informational; no formal action was taken.
