St. Mary’s County commissioners voted Sept. 22 to hold the price developers pay to avoid buying farmland preservation credits at $5,280 per credit for fiscal year 2027 — the same rate as the past two years, because for the third year running, nobody sold one privately.
The vote sets the annual “fee in lieu” for St. Mary’s County’s Transferable Development Rights (TDR) program, the county’s main financial tool for steering growth away from farmland. Commissioners approved the rate without recorded opposition after a presentation from Economic Development Director Cindy Greb and Deputy Director of Land Use and Growth Management Brandy Glenn.
The TDR program, created through the county’s zoning ordinance and revised in 2007, lets landowners in the Rural Preservation District — the county’s designated “sending area” — sever the development rights attached to their land and sell them to builders working in designated “receiving areas,” where the rights add buildable density. One development right exists for every five acres of RPD land; landowners who sell keep their property but permanently give up the right to build on it.
County code requires the fee-in-lieu rate to reset each year at 120% of the average price paid in real, private TDR sales the previous fiscal year. The catch: there haven’t been any. Greb told commissioners the last verified private sale data comes from fiscal 2024, when TDRs changed hands at an average of about $4,400 apiece — 120% of that yields the $5,280 figure the board has now approved for three straight years.
Commissioner Michael Hewitt pressed staff on why developers are bypassing landowners entirely. Glenn told the board that one recent buyer needing a large batch of TDRs found it simpler to pay the county than track down enough individual sellers and push each deal through the paperwork — title certificates, attorneys, recordation — that a private TDR transfer requires. In one case Glenn described, a landowner sold 25 TDRs for $100,000, a price well below what the fee-in-lieu would have cost a buyer for the same number of rights, but one the seller considered reasonable.
The county maintains a list — 19 landowners as of Tuesday’s meeting — of people who’ve told the county they have TDRs to sell, though staff said they don’t track how many rights each person actually has available. Anyone can request the list from the Land Use and Growth Management office rather than default to the fee.
The stakes are rising. Staff told commissioners the county currently has roughly 397 TDRs riding on subdivisions that are either already approved or still working through county review, including Kingston Crossing and The Meadows, plus a proposed development near Hollywood that hasn’t yet reached the Planning Commission. If all 397 were paid through the fee rather than bought from landowners — which is what’s happened in each of the past two fiscal years — that would put roughly $2.1 million into the county’s land preservation account rather than into the hands of the farm families the program was designed to compensate.
That account also draws from the agricultural transfer tax, the local transfer tax and a share of the county recordation tax — 35 cents of every $4 collected. As of June 30, 2026, the county had 34,603 acres under permanent conservation easements through the state’s agricultural land preservation program and the Rural Legacy program, moving toward a combined goal commissioners put at roughly 60,000 acres.
The board’s discussion echoed a broader concern raised in the county’s ongoing rewrite of its 2050 growth plan, now headed to an Oct. 6 hearing: whether the county’s land-use tools are still doing the job they were built for as development pressure grows. One commissioner told staff at Tuesday’s meeting he’d “just wish” the county were seeing development rights actually pulled off working farmland rather than replaced with a check to the county. Under the vote, nothing changes procedurally — landowners can still negotiate private sales anytime, and staff said they actively point interested buyers to the seller list — but the math, for now, still favors the county’s checkbook.
