The Baltimore County Council has created a pathway for some affordable housing to be built in areas where the council is further limiting new development because of overcrowded schools.

The council last month overrode County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr.’s veto of a companion measure to the county’s adequate public facilities ordinance, or APFO. But council members on Monday night approved a new version that included two changes to address the county executive’s concerns.

“We’re grateful to the County Council for addressing some of our key concerns with the APFO bill — and we are committed to continuing to work together to deliver the bipartisan and commonsense solutions that our residents need and deserve,” Olszewski, a Democrat, said in a statement.

The council last month approved a bill that would gradually lower the maximum enrollment allowed at a public school from 115% to 105% of capacity. It would require that developers seeking to build in overcrowded districts obtain permission from an established “public school capacity committee.”

The version approved Monday includes two amendments that the Olszewski administration had requested. The school capacity committee will only be advisory, allowing elected officials and county staff to make the final decisions about whether a school district can handle more housing.

And it exempted some affordable housing from the new limits, allowing such projects to move forward if they help the county meet its obligations under a 2016 voluntary compliance agreement with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. That agreement settled a discrimination lawsuit.

The voluntary compliance agreement tasked the county with building 1,000 new affordable housing units. Determining if proposed affordable housing meets the criteria of the 2016 agreement will fall to the committee, as well as to county staff.

The council debated the two amendments, as well as several others, for more than an hour before voting Monday night.

“We really need to get the car on the road,” said Councilman Mike Ertel, a consistent supporter of the legislation.

The bill arose from the work of a 2020 task force that made several recommendations to handle school overcrowding. The recommendations sat on the county website until a few months ago, when four councilmen introduced a bill to reduce overcrowding. Olszewski vetoed the bill. The council then overrode his veto. But rather than letting the law stand, they decided to write a new law that would allay some of the concerns of the county and the school board.

Councilman Todd Crandell, a Republican who represents the Dundalk and Essex areas, provided the key vote to override the veto on July 1. But Crandell was furious about the carve-out for affordable housing; his district includes Sparrows Point High School, which is at 130% capacity. Plans to redevelop Fort Howard, a military installation on the North Point Peninsula, could exacerbate that situation.

“I do not want to hear that affordable housing is an appropriate thing in a community that has an overcrowded school with an infrastructure that can’t handle more high-density housing that I have been protecting for 10 years,” Crandell said. The 7th District, he said, has more than played its part in providing affordable housing. Crandell put his concerns in an amendment to take out the affordable housing clause from the bill, but the amendment failed.

Crandell was joined in voting against the new version by Republican colleagues Wade Kach and David Marks. Voting in favor were the council’s four Democrats: Ertel, Chair Izzy Patoka, Julian E. Jones Jr., and Pat Young.