195 Houses Planned Next to Hollifield Station Elementary

A major residential development on a 122 acre location that is framed by Hollifield Station Elementary and Patapsco Valley State Park on Rogers Avenue in Ellicott City is beginning the county approval process.

Developer Simon Rosenberg, who built the nearby Furrow Avenue development, is planning to place 195 single family houses on the property, according to plans submitted to the Department of Planning and Zoning (DPZ).


Developers first presented the plan for The Estates at Patapsco Park, in a pre-submission meeting in October 2012. Last month, the latest site plan was submitted to DPZ.

The plan calls for detached single family houses built tightly together, new road alignments on Rogers Avenue and a new sidewalk extending from the entrance of the development to Hollified Station Elementary. About 70 acres of the property will be preserved, according to the site plan.

Rosenberg owned the property before it was transferred to the State Highway Administration, which was planning on extending U.S. 29 into Baltimore County through the property. However, when U.S. 29 was not extended, the property was returned to Rosenberg, said the property's project manager for the county, Brenda Barth.

The county presented a number of possible problems with the plan, including its impact on the nearby forest at Patapsco Valley State Park, the traffic caused by 195 homes, as well as the additional students at Hollifield Station Elementary, according to documents associated with the site plan.

The Howard County Public School System wrote that it estimates the development would add 200 students to Hollifield Elementary, with most of them being dropped off between 8 a.m. and 8:30 a.m., even if a sidewalk is built. That's also a time when area workers are using the same road to access U.S. 29 South.

"This forecast implies that an already unacceptable traffic scenario will be made worse," wrote HCPSS in a memo.

Traffic engineers for the county recommended that an additional left hand turn lane from Rogers to U.S. 29 be added to handle the new traffic, according to site plan documents. The engineers also critiqued the traffic study done by the developer, writing that it represented "an overly optimistic scenario."

The zoning department recommended the developer build townhouses on the wooded property, rather than detached houses, to limit the environmental impact, but the developers responded that the neighbors asked for detached houses, according to memos.

The property is split-zoned, with about a quarter of it R-20 (residential) and three quarters of it R-ED (residential environmental development), which allows single family attached houses.

DPZ has not formally issued an opinion on the project yet. The next stage of the development process is to bring the site plan before the Planning Board. A Planning Board meeting to discuss the site plan has not been scheduled, according to Barth.

Rosenberg did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.

What do you think of the proposed development? Tell us in the comments.
 
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