A plan to remake Howard County's oldest shopping center into a mixed community of apartments, shops and offices reached a key stage Thursday night as the county zoning board began hearing the case of the half-century-old Normandy Shopping Center on U.S. 40.
Cultivated as a Moxley family farm in 1893, Normandy was the first commercial development of its kind west of the Patapsco River, testified David Moxley, who told the board that three generations of his family have owned and later developed the property. Ezekiel Robert Moxley had nine children, he said, and taught them how to operate a stone-crushing machine, turning his 115 acres of otherwise troublesome rocks into a commodity he sold to Howard County for paving roads.
"We are here to stay," Moxley said. "Howard County is our home." When it opened in 1961, Normandy had a Safeway supermarket, a Read's drugstore, a McCrory's and a White Coffee Pot restaurant. An expansion was built in 1984, but now nearly one-third of the center's space is empty.
"Normandy has reached the end of its useful life as it was built," he said, speaking for the half-dozen other family members in the audience in the County Council's chamber in the George Howard Building.
The Moxleys want the board to approve "traditional neighborhood center" zoning for the 24.4-acre site because that will allow residential units mixed with the stores and offices in an "Avenue"-style center. Such a change was rejected by the County Council in 2005, based on concerns that the project would add too many residences for area schools and other infrastructure to handle.
The family's attorney, William Erskine, must convince the board — made up of the five County Council members — that leaving the current commercial zoning in place when the last comprehensive rezoning was done in 2005 was a legal mistake. Without that judgment by the board, the rezoning to allow 200 apartments to be built will have to wait until the next round of countywide comprehensive rezoning is done by the County Council, perhaps in 2013 or 2014.
The board is a quasi-legal body, restricted by laws that don't limit County Council as a legislative body, and critics of the plan who live in adjoining Normandy Heights homes — also built by the Moxleys — say the 2005 rejection was justified.
"You will not hear any credible evidence that any facts you're presented with was a mistake," argued county zoning counsel Eileen Powers, whose job it is to defend the current commercial zoning. "Had the County Council known then what you will hear now, it would have made the same decision."
Kathleen A. Birrani, another attorney for a resident said, "We are not here to talk about mistakes in judgment. We are here to talk about mistakes in facts." Nearly a dozen area residents opposed to the rezoning or just interested in watching also appeared — along with one, Stephen Cohen, of Normandy Heights, who favors it.
County planners have been encouraging mixed-use redevelopment of older shopping areas as a smart-growth initiative that would direct growth to areas already equipped with infrastructure, reduce traffic by having people live where they can also shop or work, and help failing older centers start fresh.
The plan for Normandy is to demolish the existing center in stages, starting with the oldest row of store buildings, including the vacant former Safeway supermarket, and replace them with a more urban-style center with offices above stores, plus four-story apartment buildings at the rear of the site. Some nearby residents particularly object to the apartments and the so-called spot rezoning.
But Sean Davis, a land planner hired by the Moxleys, said there were a series of major errors in 2005. First, the center's interior private road was thought to be a public road then, dividing the property and sharply reducing the area that could be redeveloped. Second, Rogers Avenue, which borders the center, is a major thoroughfare, not the small residential street the last council thought.
In addition, that earlier council did not know that Safeway wanted a much larger building and would leave the center in 2009, or that a new Veterans Elementary School would be built nearby, solving the school crowding problem through 2015.
"This is the absolutely perfect example of where [neighborhood center zoning] ought to be located," Davis said. The hearing will continue March 9.