When Valdis Lazdins and his future wife first visited Columbia, Route 29 was a quiet, four-lane divided road.
Making their way from the interstate to the lakefront, "I don't think we saw a car," he said.
The planned communitywas then in its infancy. As the pair ate dinner at Clyde's, Lazdins noticed a group of teenagers strumming a guitar against the backdrop of Lake Kittamaqundi.
"And I thought, 'Are these plants? This is too perfect of a photo op,'" he remembered.
Lazdins would later move to Columbia to work for a planning firm there between 1983 and 1996.
Now, after nearly 20 years working around the country, he's back – this time as director of Howard County's Department of Planning and Zoning.
Lazdins, who started last week, takes the reins from DPZ Director Marsha McLaughlin, who is stepping down Tuesday after 13 years at the helm of the department.
In the meantime, Columbia, and Howard County have seen "tremendous change," Lazdins said. Just a few decades ago, "the rest of it was all vacant land."
Lazdins, 62, is taking on the role of planning director at a time of significant change for the county. Downtown Columbia is beginning to transform into the urban core envisioned in its master plan, while the focus along Route 1 and Route 40, which are, respectively, the industrial and strip shopping center corridors of the county, is on revitalization. Faced with increasing outside competition, Columbia's village centers will also have to evolve.
Lazdins, who worked most recently for the Montgomery County Planning Department, brings a research-based perspective to the task of managing that change. As chief of research and special projects in Montgomery, he worked on a study of the office market in the Washington region, and was preparing to launch a study of national retail trends before accepting the job in Howard County.
A path forward for the village centers will likely be found, at least in part, through studies such as those, he said.
"Retail really has changed, and that has had an impact on the viability of many of the village centers, especially the ones that are positioned more internally and off the main drag," he said. "Places like Long Reach are challenged by that."
Facilitating change
A Michigan native, Lazdins' career has taken him throughout the United States on a variety of assignments, from land-use studies for a Denver cattle ranch to resort planning in Alaska.
He's worked as a principal at an Indianapolis design firm, assistant planning director for the city of Grand Rapids, Mich., and for a land-use firm founded by former Rouse Co. planners, where he worked on assignments in Columbia, Reston, Va., and as a project director for the Woodrow Wilson Bridge replacement – "the project that got me gray hair," he said.
In some respects, the Howard County position will be a change of pace from these jobs and from his most recent post in Montgomery County. Howard differs from its neighbor to the west in more than a few ways.
With a population of about 1 million, Montgomery County has more than three times the residents of Howard, and its planning department is divided into geographic teams. Lazdins served for some time as chief of Area One, the portion of the county inside the Beltway, where he worked on planning four stops for the Purple Line, a light rail project that recently won funding from Gov. Larry Hogan. Planning Board meetings in Montgomery County have been known to last an entire day, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., he said.
But Howard and Montgomery counties also have some notable similarities. Both are short on open land, for example.
"I think in Howard County, similar to Montgomery County, a lot has been built out," Lazdins said. "I remember even in the '90s, when I was working here, we'd joke – we said it's nothing but the tough land that's left."
With redevelopment the next logical phase for some older areas of the county, going up against 60 years of built investment will be a challenge, he said.
"From a strategy standpoint, I think we need to look at where are there opportunities for change, and from the public sector standpoint, what kinds of carrots do we need to dangle in front of these property owners to facilitate change? ... I think that facilitating change in the right locations is going to be key."
For now, however, Lazdins says his "number one priority is to figure out how the county operates."
In the short term, he's also hoping to fill vacant staff positions and make improvements to the planning department's website so that more information can be made available to the public.
He's taking on the role of planning director right as a task force appointed by County Executive Allan Kittleman starts to review the Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance, which is intended to ensure that infrastructure in the county keeps pace with development.
Lazdins looked at APFO back in the late '80s, when he collaborated with then-Planning Director Uri Avin on a survey of the ordinances in jurisdictions across the nation.
The result was a telephone book-thick collection of survey results: "I know a little bit about the APF," he said.
In a "soup to nuts" career, he added, "I've been in the trenches."
McLaughlin looks back
Marsha McLaughlin, the retiring DPZ director, has spent 27 years in the Howard County planning and zoning department and 13 years as its director.
When she first started in 1988, "it was a very busy time," McLaughlin recalled.
In her first few years on the job, planners rezoned 96,000 acres of rural land, created density exchanges and clustering opportunities for development and restructured the county's agricultural preservation program to become the first nationally to operate on an installment purchase program, a structure that allowed more land to be rapidly preserved.
In the east, "which was firmly defined as being where we wanted growth to be," ideas were starting to come together.
The county's first adequate public facilities ordinance was also created around that time, as planners tried to "catch up on growth that had really gotten out of control and get a game plan in place at a time that was also a tremendous amount of development going on," McLaughlin said.
During her time at the head of DPZ, plans for downtown Columbia – a project she considers her greatest legacy – have been set in motion, and work has started to revitalize the Route 1 and Route 40 corridors.
Not even the great recession could stem the desire to build in Howard County: "It's one of the most desirable places to live and work," McLaughlin said.
As director of DPZ, she has been accused of being too developer-friendly.
County Executive Allan Kittleman criticized her department on the campaign trail last year, when he told people at a town hall meeting in Glenwood that there was a "problem with the Department of Planning and Zoning.
"Here, we have a situation where the leadership of the county has allowed the Department of Planning and Zoning to be controlled by a few people," he said at the time.
McLaughlin said she understands why residents feel uneasy about development, particularly in a county that was predominantly rural not so long ago.
"I do think the challenge of accepting change gets more difficult as things get tighter, and I think this is common in planning departments in high-growth areas all around the country," she said. "I think the challenge is to try and have as much communication as possible about what the strategy is for how we propose to develop."
As she steps down, McLaughlin said she doesn't have plans to start as planning director elsewhere. Instead, she'd like to focus on community service. She currently serves on the board of Neighbor Space, a Baltimore County nonprofit that works to create green spaces in older communities.
She predicts that Howard County will weather its changes with grace.
"I think one of the things that Americans don't really think about, because while some of our older cities like Baltimore, New York, Boston have been here a really long time, compared to Europe, they're all pretty new," she said.
In Europe, where cities are easily 500 years old, "they're always fine-tuning things that are working," she said. "Howard County will continue to be a wonderful place to live and work, for, I hope, centuries. But it will be very different as time goes on."