Farm Owners Say Calvert Ag Rules Reach Existing Districts

Prince Frederick- Calvert County’s first full rewrite of its farmland preservation rules since 1978 was supposed to leave existing preservation districts alone. A speaker for a group of farm owners told the Board of County Commissioners on Oct. 20 that one new clause would not.

The clause, Section 10B of the proposed Agricultural Preservation Rules and Regulations, says that if an existing Agricultural Preservation District, or APD, does not have all of its transferable development rights certified within one year, the new rules apply to it. The speaker, who said he represented property owners and farmers with land in the districts, said nothing in the current rules sets that deadline.

The commissioners took no action. On a unanimous voice vote, they kept the hearing record open and scheduled a decision for their Nov. 17 meeting, alongside a companion zoning text amendment, TA 26-29.

The stakes run to the core of how Calvert has kept its farms. The county’s transferable development rights program, created in 1978, lets owners in an APD sell the development potential of their land to builders in growth areas. Once the rights are sold or allocated, permanent covenants are recorded on the farm. The program has become a market of its own: development rights in Calvert rose 18% in value over three years, the Chronicle reported earlier this month.

A promise of no retroactive rules

Planning staff opened the hearing by stressing the opposite point. Jen David, a planner in the Department of Planning and Zoning, told the board the revised rules would apply only to APDs created after they take effect. She cited Article 4-2.D of the county zoning ordinance, which says each district is governed by the rules in place when it was created, except for withdrawal provisions.

“The updated rules and regulations are not being applied retroactively,” David told the commissioners, adding that existing districts keep all their rights and entitlements under the zoning ordinance.

The speaker argued that Section 10B undercuts that direction. Under the current rules, he said, the only certification requirement is that a development right be certified before it is sold. The new clause, he said, would force owners to act within a year and, if they missed the deadline, put them under the new rules and reduce the rights available to them.

He asked the board for several changes:

• Strike Section 10B.
• State in the rules themselves, not only in the zoning ordinance, that districts are governed by the rules in effect when they were created, so owners can find the answer in one place.
• Fix a cross-reference: the zoning ordinance points to Section VII of the rules for provisions covering all districts, but in the new draft that material sits in Section 9.

Several members of the county’s Agricultural Preservation Advisory Board attended the hearing. Planning and Zoning Director Jason Brinkley said they were there to show support for the rules.

Staff to review the clause

Brinkley said staff would look closely at Section 10B before Nov. 17. He said a provision very similar to it had been in the zoning ordinance, but that version keys its deadline to the zoning ordinance’s adoption date, which would mean it is already in effect even though the new rules have not been adopted. Staff will recommend at the next meeting whether it should come out, he said.

He also said adding plain language at the front of the rules to state that they are not retroactive was a reasonable suggestion, and that correcting the zoning ordinance’s section reference would require a separate text amendment. He called the issues the speaker raised “legitimate.”

The rewrite has been in the works for more than a year. Staff and the advisory board presented a draft to the Planning Commission on Aug. 20, 2025, and held a public information session Aug. 28, 2025. The commissioners reviewed public comments at work sessions on Sept. 30 and Dec. 2, 2025. A revised draft dated June 22, 2026, was released July 2, and the board scheduled the hearing at a July 7 work session. Background and the draft are posted on the county’s agricultural preservation update page.

Short of the 40,000-acre goal

The larger purpose of the rewrite is to reopen the program. Calvert stopped accepting new APDs in 2013 after an oversupply of development rights on the private market from 2007 to 2012 hurt the program, according to the county. A 2020 TDR committee review recommended lifting the moratorium once the advisory board’s changes are adopted, and the new rules update eligibility criteria for that reopening.

The county’s goal, set on the TDR committee’s recommendation, is to permanently preserve at least 40,000 acres of prime farm and forest land. Asked how close the county is, David gave these figures:

The local APD program is the county’s dominant tool, David said. The rest of the preserved total comes from three state programs: the Maryland Agricultural Land Preservation Foundation, the Maryland Environmental Trust and Rural Legacy. Calvert has also been adding land through state easement purchases; the commissioners advanced agricultural land easements in June.

The roughly 1,200 acres with uncertified rights are the land a one-year certification deadline would affect most directly.

Companion zoning changes

TA 26-29, heard just before the rules, moves provisions on the Agricultural Preservation Advisory Board and on development rights in APDs out of the zoning ordinance and into the new rules and bylaws, so they are not duplicated. It moves conditions for land-clearing debris landfills the other way, into the zoning ordinance. It also drops the Board of Appeals special exception now required for sand, gravel or mineral extraction without processing in an APD, because the advisory board must already approve that use. Staff recommended holding TA 26-29 for the same Nov. 17 vote, and the board agreed unanimously.

In the same set of hearings, the commissioners adopted two other amendments that the Planning Commission advanced in September, including TA 26-30, which restores a setback policy for new lots in the Dunkirk Town Center that was dropped in last year’s zoning ordinance update.

State law requires the board to wait at least 10 days after the hearing before acting on the rules. Brinkley said a separate set of bylaws governing how the advisory board itself operates will also come to the commissioners in November.