PRINCE FREDERICK — Calvert County residents who want to board or breed dogs for money at home will now have to make their case at a public hearing first, and their neighbors will get a say.
The Board of County Commissioners on Oct. 20 adopted a zoning text amendment requiring home-based commercial kennels to win special exception approval from the Board of Appeals. In the same block of votes, commissioners gave property owners an extra year to qualify for exception lots after a stretch of poor percolation testing conditions, and restored a Dunkirk Town Center setback rule that dropped out of the county’s 2025 zoning rewrite. Each passed by voice vote with no opposition heard.
A fourth proposal, which would let parks and other public recreation areas swap old manual reader boards for electronic message signs, did not get that far. Commissioners kept its record open for more public comment and asked staff to count how many signs could qualify before they vote.
Neighbors get a hearing on kennels
Under the county’s home occupation rules, a home business generally has to be run entirely inside the house or an enclosed accessory building, and it is capped at 600 square feet, according to the county’s home occupation permit application. The same application notes that no inspection is required for the permit itself.
Text amendment 26-28 changes that framework for two uses that can’t realistically stay indoors. It explicitly exempts in-home day cares and home commercial kennels from the indoors-only condition, acknowledging, in the words of planning staff, that both will use outdoor space to some extent.
The tradeoff for kennel operators is a new layer of review. Will Hager, a planner with the Department of Planning and Zoning, told commissioners the county has fielded complaints from residents unhappy that a neighbor was running a commercial kennel out of a home, even with the 600-square-foot cap keeping operations small.
Sending the applications to the Board of Appeals means adjoining owners are notified and can comment in writing or at a required public hearing, Hager said. The appeals board can also attach conditions, such as minimum setbacks, which staff described as a way to settle disputes before they start rather than after.
No one signed up to speak in person on the change, and no one among the callers online raised a hand. In-home day cares do not need the special exception under the amendment; the hearing requirement applies to kennels.
More time to perc
Text amendment 26-26 pushes back the sunset for getting preliminary approval of exception lots by one year, from March 1, 2027, to March 1, 2028. After that date, staff said, the ability to create exception lots ends.
The reason is the ground itself. A lot that relies on a septic system has to pass a percolation test showing the soil can absorb wastewater, and staff told commissioners that recent conditions have not been conducive to perc testing. Extending the deadline, Hager said, is meant to be fair to owners who have not been able to get a test done in time.
Perc tests in Maryland are typically run during the wet season, when groundwater is high, so a dry or short testing window can leave owners waiting another full year. Neighboring Anne Arundel County, for example, schedules its wet season perc testing as a set annual program each winter and spring.
Fixing what the rewrite missed
All of the amendments trace back to the comprehensive zoning ordinance rewrite that took effect March 1, 2025. Commissioners added text amendments on Sept. 30, 2025, and again on July 28, 2026, and Hager said this round addresses outstanding issues those earlier updates did not reach.
Text amendment 26-30 is the clearest example. It restores the setback policy for new lots in the Dunkirk Town Center that applied before the rewrite. Staff said the provision was simply omitted during the update, and the amendment corrects that.
Two other amendments heard the same morning have already drawn their own coverage. Commissioners adopted 26-27, which cuts critical area replanting from three times to two times the cleared area for qualifying homeowners. They held 26-29, a companion to the county’s updated agricultural preservation rules, for a vote alongside those rules.
Sign rule stalls over who qualifies
Text amendment 26-25 would let a public recreation area that had a manual reader board as of March 1, 2025, replace the sign face with an electronic message center. The sign could not grow, and messages would have to be static, changing instantly without special effects, under the existing ordinance. Staff said the policy mirrors one adopted last year for places of worship.
The county defines a public recreation area as one open to the public, with or without an entrance fee, used mainly for recreation and owned by a government or nonprofit. Staff named the county fairgrounds as one example and said the number of eligible signs would likely be in single digits.
Commissioners were not ready to sign off. One asked whether permanent electronic signs would start popping up along side roads, and another worried about distracting drivers on Route 231. A third commissioner said the definition felt broad and asked why firehouses and other nonprofits would be left out, warning that the county risked picking and choosing who gets a sign. Planning staff acknowledged that any line drawn will include some groups and exclude others.
An initial motion to adopt 26-25 as presented drew no immediate second. Commissioners instead voted, on a motion from Commissioner Mark Cox, to keep the record open, collect more public comment and bring back a count of signs that could qualify.
That puts both the sign rule and the agricultural preservation package on the agenda for Nov. 17, the board’s next regular meeting and among the last before a new board is seated after the Nov. 3 general election. The current board has been moving several land-use items before then, including a proposal to ban data centers in every zoning district and a move to undo industrial zoning on 1,352 acres in Lusby.
