Challenge: Assist town in maintaining small town character amidst strong residential development pressure from DC and Baltimore job markets.

Overview: Jakubiak & Associates, Inc. is an active participant in town planning in Maryland. Like many communities, Church Hill retained our services to address both specific challenges and to provide overall improvements in their capabilities to manage growth and development.

In 2003, the Town of Church Hill contracted us to prepare a comprehensive update of its zoning ordinance. This project experience gave us a great local perspective on the planning and development issues in Queen Anne’s County. The Town hired our firm after many months of wrangling with growth and development issues and within 45 days of being on-board, we had completed our work and the Town had adopted a comprehensive update of the zoning ordinance.

Jakubiak & Associates, Inc. provided a forum for building consensus about how best to address growth. We started by achieving consensus among planning commission members and interested citizens on the vision for the Town and dealing with many of the on-the-ground issues not adequately addressed in the Town’s Comprehensive Plan. We facilitated a necessarily technical community dialogue on lot sizes and residential densities and brought balance to the Town’s regulation of new growth. To harness strong residential market forces while preserving land area for future “in-town” commercial development, we created a new mix-use overlay zoning district. We completely revised the Church Hill zoning ordinance, making it a viable tool for directing growth.

The Town has since contracted with Jakubiak & Associates, Inc. to provide ongoing consulting assistance. In this capacity we are negotiating annexation agreements, revising subdivision and road ordinances, updating critical area provisions and in general building the capability of Town Hall to administer an intelligent development review and approval process in light of very strong projected growth rates.

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