Prince George’s developers can still pay to play

Two bills that passed the Maryland General Assembly just before its 2011 session ended are nothing more than toothless tigers that will do precious little to change the pay-to-pay culture that lets developers get what they want in Prince George’s County.

The Gazette and Post recently reported that Maryland state legislators were working to close a longstanding loophole in state ethics and campaign finance law.

Current law allows county-level elected officials to receive indirect contributions from developers while, at the same time, being allowed to participate in the review of those same developers’ projects in the county.

Sadly, however, the bills that the General Assembly approved on April 7, 2011 (SB 902 and HB 1089) fall far short of making meaningful reforms.

Sponsored by Senate President Thomas V. “Mike” Miller (D-Dist. 27) of Chesapeake Beach and the Prince George’s County House delegation, the legislation sought to improve existing state ethics laws by prohibiting developer payments to so-called “slates,” which are campaign committees made up of a group of candidates rather than a single candidate.

Existing law prohibits developer payments to the county executive and to an individual council member’s campaign committee or PAC while certain development applications are pending before the Council, or within 36 months of the filing of those applications. However, payments to slates are allowed.

Similarly, existing law forbids council members from participating in certain development review proceedings if their campaign committee or PAC received a contribution from an affected developer, but not if a slate to which they belonged received such a contribution. SB 902 and HB 1089 fix those problems by treating slates in the same manner as a council member’s individual campaign committee or PAC.

The problem is that the two bills fail to fix the other gaping loophole in existing law, which excludes “detailed site plans” from the definition of “Application” to which the developer pay-to-play ban applies. Detailed site plan review is required for most significant forms of development in Prince George’s County, including but not limited to:

• Attached housing, such as townhouses and multifamily dwellings;
• Planned employment parks;
• Planned mixed-use developments;
• Large parking compounds;
• Recreational community developments;
• Screening or buffering as a necessary design element;
• Large single-use developments;
• Development on environmentally sensitive land, or land that contains important natural features that are particularly worthy of attention;
• Development which is potentially incompatible with land uses on surrounding properties;
• Buildings or land uses that are a part of particularly sensitive views as seen from adjacent properties or streets; and
• Development on land in Development District Overlay Zones, Transit District Development Zones, Commercial Regional Center Zones, and Waterfront Entertainment/Retail Complex Zones.

Without including detailed site plans in their purview, these otherwise well-intentioned bills do nothing to change the odious pay-to-pay culture that has come to define, taint, and cripple the development review process in Prince George’s County.

Although the legislature’s April 11 adjournment leaves no opportunity to fix these bills now, lawmakers will have another chance to do so later this year, when a special legislative session is convened to adopt congressional redistricting plans. The Prince George’s County legislative delegation and Senator Miller should make sure that this quick-and-easy fix to these ethics bills is done at that time.