Guys, we need to talk about APFO in Howard County.
Specifically, we need to talk about the fact that our Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance (APFO) isn’t doing anything to help school capacity, and it’s creating a barrier to affirmatively furthering fair housing. So what does it accomplish? Has it put us on a sustainable path?
APFOs are intended to help jurisdictions manage growth by making new development approval contingent on the existence of adequate public facilities such as roads, schools, and sewers. A well-constructed APFO pairs phased development with impact fees and capital improvement plans for expanded and improved public facilities to accommodate the growth.
Howard County’s APFO was born in 1992, at a time when Howard County was adding more than 3,000 new housing units a year. Our “schools test” was designed to delay new development in a given school catchment area if its elementary or middle school exceeded certain space utilization thresholds. The rate of development slowed considerably after the 2000 General Plan update, and in the period from 2000 until now, Howard County built two high schools, two middle schools, and five elementary schools. Still, our student population growth outpaced school capacity growth in some areas of the county during this period.
So in 2018, we tightened our APFO restrictions. We reduced the maximum utilization thresholds in school capacity tests and began to test high schools as well. But we also did something else: we created a local, more conservative formula for determining the capacity of a given school, rather than using the Maryland State Department of Education’s State-Rated Capacity (SRC) formula.
The HCPSS Feasibility Study describes the local and state formulas for calculating school capacity. The most significant differences are that the state formula has a lower minimum square footage than Howard County’s, and the state includes space for alternative education, special education, pre-K, and career/technology education in its calculations where Howard County does not.
The result of this difference in calculation is that:
- 34 of our 42 elementary schools have an SRC that is greater than the local capacity. Of those, 12 have an SRC that is greater than local by 100 seats or more.
- 14 of our 20 middle schools have an SRC that is greater than the local capacity. Of those, 3 have an SRC that is greater than local by 100 seats or more.
- 6 of our 13 high schools have an SRC that is greater than the local capacity. Of those, 4 have an SRC that is greater than local by 100 seats or more. Three of those are by 200 or more.
The “so what?” is this: the state will provide 56% of new school costs to Howard County if they decide that a new school is warranted. But the MSDE uses SRC – not our local capacities – when determining whether or not a school district is sufficiently over capacity that the state will help fund a new school (or addition/renovation). Not only that, but the MSDE expects school systems to redistrict to make use of as many open seats as possible, so it looks at available capacity (again, using SRC) at adjacent schools in its consideration of capital funding requests as well.
In short, this means that the net effect of our APFO is that we significantly slow new development while we leave state capital money for schools on the table. Not only that, but the significant decrease in new development (2022 saw only 753 occupancy permits compared to a five-year average of ~1,200), and the fact that Howard County has very little developable land left, means we are hitting a wall in terms of revenue growth from new property taxes and school surcharges that would help us pay for new schools and perform maintenance on old schools. And since APFO has no control over existing homes being sold (at an average rate of about 4,000 a year in Howard County), apartments turning over, or birth rates, we are reaching a point where we can no longer rely on new development to pay for expansions and improvements to the public facilities that we all use regardless of how long we’ve lived here. A school does not stop costing money the day of the ribbon cutting.
There’s another rub to all this. The Baltimore Region Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Report documents all the barriers people face to fair and affordable housing opportunities in the Baltimore metropolitan area. In Howard County, APFO was noted in the AI report as a barrier to affirmatively furthering fair housing in the way it causes higher housing prices and disparately impacts the less affluent (see page 317 for a full explanation).
So if Howard County’s APFO isn’t solving our infrastructure issues, is impeding revenue growth, and is worsening our housing affordability crisis, then what is it accomplishing?
Maybe, as we go into our next General Plan update, it’s time to start rethinking APFO.
