PRINCE FREDERICK — Calvert County took its first formal step Oct. 21 toward stripping heavy industrial zoning from 1,352 acres in Lusby, including the forested land beside Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant that neighbors say was rezoned with too little public notice.
The Calvert County Planning Commission voted by voice, with no audible opposition, to direct staff to start the 60-day review the state requires before a county can amend its comprehensive plan. The proposed amendment would return every property in the county’s new Industrial Two, or I-2, district to the zoning it had before the 2025 countywide rezoning.
For residents along Camp Canoy Road and nearby neighborhoods, the change would restore the farm-and-forest buffer between their homes and the plant property. For Constellation Energy, which owns the Calvert Cliffs land, it would take away zoning the company says it may need for future power generation.
What would change
Principal Long Range Planner Taé Harris told the commission the Board of County Commissioners directed staff on Sept. 22 to process the rezoning. The affected land falls in two areas:
- 726 acres next to Calvert Cliffs
- 626 acres around the Appeal convenience center and landfill and the Solomons wastewater treatment plant
Before 2025, those properties were zoned Rural Community District, Farm and Forest District or Industrial One, Harris said. The amendment would also change the county’s future land use map.
The commission met in a work session, so county attorney John Mattingly advised it could not take substantive action beyond starting the review. Under Section 3-203 of the Land Use Article of the Maryland Code, a proposed plan amendment must be sent out for state and regional review at least 60 days before the planning commission’s public hearing. That puts any hearing on the rezoning at least two months away.
How the land became industrial
The I-2 district was created in Calvert’s comprehensive rezoning, which commissioners approved Feb. 18, 2025, and which took effect March 1, 2025. Residents said they did not learn of the change until spring 2026, after Amazon Web Services filed a site plan for a data center campus on Constellation land. AWS has since dropped that plan.
At the Sept. 22 commissioners’ meeting, the Chronicle reported, the board told staff to pursue three options before its term ends in December: extend the data center moratorium, remove data centers as a permitted use and reverse the rezoning. The same night as the I-2 vote, the Planning Commission sent the countywide data center ban to a public hearing.
Constellation lays out its case
A Constellation representative who said she grew up in the area and whose father worked at the plant repeated remarks she gave commissioners Oct. 20. She said Calvert Cliffs has been a cornerstone of the county for 50 years, employs hundreds of local workers and pays about $21 million a year in local taxes.
She described the roughly 2,000-acre campus as four parcels. The plant sits on Parcel A. Parcel B, 726 acres just south of the plant, was split between Industrial One and Farm and Forest before 2025. Parcels C and D, about 530 acres combined, were farm and forest and remain so. In spring 2024, she said, Constellation asked during the comprehensive rezoning to put all of Parcel B in the industrial zone and to move Parcels A and B into the new I-2 district. She said the county’s process included three public hearings in 2024.
She said heavy industrial zoning on the property is responsible land use and asked the commission to consider how its decision could hinder new energy projects at the site. A Constellation attorney, answering a commissioner’s question, said the rezoning would not affect the plant upgrades tied to the company’s power purchase agreement with Amazon, which are planned where the plant already sits. The county has said it was not consulted on that deal.
Residents push back on the process
Four public speakers urged the county to reverse the rezoning.
Pam Warner, speaking for Indivisible Calvert County, argued that Constellation used the comprehensive rezoning because a standalone request would have required the commissioners to find either a substantial change in the neighborhood or a mistake in the original zoning. Comprehensive rezonings are exempt from that test under county rules, she said. She cited Constellation’s own request letter and the AWS stormwater filing, which she said described the land as largely undeveloped and forested.
Jeanette Wysocki of Chesapeake Beach laid out a timeline. Public comment on the draft plan opened Dec. 8, 2023, with a forum Dec. 14 and comments due Dec. 29, she said, and the joint work session was Jan. 17, 2024. A request made in spring 2024 came after that comment period, she said, and every public comment in the record on the final draft opposed I-2 in Lusby.
A Camp Canoy Road resident said Parcel B had been split-zoned deliberately to leave a buffer for neighbors, and that two sides of his property now border heavy industrial land that was farm and forest when he built his home. Reversing the rezoning would still leave Constellation more than 1,000 acres of industrial land, he said, and would give back about 600 acres of buffer.
Judy Peterson, an at-large candidate for county commissioner who said she lives in Lusby, urged the county to start environmental, wildlife and noise studies now to build a record in case the reversal is challenged. She also asked the county to examine how a change of this size happened with so little notice.
What comes next
After the 60-day review, the amendment returns to the Planning Commission for a public hearing and a recommendation, then to the Board of County Commissioners for a final decision. The current board’s term ends in December, and new commissioners take office Dec. 15, so the final vote is likely to fall to the incoming board.
