The town of Boring gets to stay boring. Soldiers Delight will continue to delight Owings Mills neighbors. And Mohrs Legacy will not be the enduring senior home development that the developers of Mohrs Legacy LLC hoped it would.

Those seeking zoning changes at these sites, and hundreds of others, learned their fate Tuesday night. After a year of hearings, many hours of staff and citizens’ time, and likely tens of thousands of dollars spent on attorneys’ fees, the Baltimore County Council completed work on its Comprehensive Zoning Map Process when Chairman Izzy Patoka struck the gavel around 10 p.m.

No councilman voted against any other councilman’s recommendations for zoning changes in their respective districts, though they often disagreed with the Planning Board’s recommendations for properties. Ultimately, each councilman has the final say over changes in his home district, which the council enters into the record.

“To the casual observer, this might seem tedious,” Councilman Todd Crandell said as the fourth hour dragged on. “But this is the culmination of a lot of hard work.”

Every four years, Baltimore County goes through a contentious zoning reshuffling known as the CZMP. Any resident can request the county rezone a piece of property, whether or not they own it. Zoning requests often come from a few influential attorneys who represent property owners looking to increase, or change the nature of, what they can build.

No county in the region rezones as often or as comprehensively as Baltimore County. Many of the issues that emerged Tuesday night will come up again in four years; some of them were repeats from four years ago.

Baltimore County’s professional planning staff reviews the requests and makes recommendations. They then go to the county’s planning commission, made up of a mix of real estate professionals and community leaders appointed by the County Council and county executive.

Planning commission members hold hearings in the districts and collect feedback from residents. Then, county planners put together a list of the properties for which zoning changes had been requested, as well as the staff and planning commission recommendations.

Tuesday night, the councilmen broke off all the properties where they disagreed with the planning board and rezoned them in the way they thought best, based on feedback from their constituents. There was no discussion of any of the nearly 400 properties on the list. Sometimes, the councilmen were rezoning fractions of an acre; sometimes, dozens of acres at once. At times, the chamber felt like a bingo game, with one councilman calling out numbers and the others saying “aye” in response.

Just like in bingo, some walk away winners, and in the 2024 CZMP, those cheering were often community members.

“We were saved!” texted Sam Blum, a resident of Boring who had fought a zoning change to the town’s beloved bingo hall during the 2020 rezoning and had just done it again. Blum then added, “for another four years,” a reference to the possibility he may have to fight off a zoning change for a third time in 2028 with a new councilman. His county councilman, Julian Jones, is running for County Executive. Councilman Wade Kach, who represented the district in 2020, is likely not going to run again. The town of Boring will likely have a new councilmember anyway; residents will be voting in November on whether to expand the council from 7 to 9, which would likely change many of the districts.

Here’s a look at some of the most contentious issues from the 2024 process:

Boring fire hall

Residents of Boring, near Upperco and close to the border with Carroll County, loved their local fire hall for bingo nights and annual picnics. When the volunteer fire company that owned it merged with one in Upperco, it put the building up for sale. The buyers, Santo and Debra Mirabile, were leaders of the Hanover Road Association, which represented the 200 or so homes in the community. In 2020, the Mirabiles tried to change the zoning from rural conservation to a more industrial zoning so they could move their family construction business there.

Residents objected, eventually forming a rival community association. Kach, the councilman at the time, split the difference, designating part of the property for local business uses, such as a shopping center and animal boarding, and the rest for rural conservation to protect local streams. The Mirabiles wanted manufacturing zoning for the whole property, which both the old and new community associations opposed. Jones voted to keep the zoning as Kach had it.

“We’re happy, we’re ecstatic, and we are so thankful to Councilman Jones,” said Pam Ecker of the Boring Community Association. “He listened, many times.”

Berrymans Lane trucking facility

Berrymans Lane LLC wanted to change the zoning from rural conservation to business major at Berrymans Lane and Deer Park Road. Neighbors were worried that a towing company could develop 4 acres near Soldiers Delight Natural Environment Area, a serpentine barren that is home to rare, endangered and threatened plants as well as minerals.

Residents poured into meetings to oppose this change. Jones listened, and did not change the zoning. Jones told residents that he had never seen as much opposition to zoning issues as he had in the Boring and Berrymans cases. Donna Shoemaker, a Randallstown resident whose late husband wrote a book about Soldiers Delight, said part of that opposition stemmed from business incursions into the Urban-Rural Demarcation Line, which has been preserving much of the county since 1967.

Mohrs Legacy in Perry Hall

The developer hoped to build 45 senior housing units at 8745 Gerst Ave. in a now-forested area between Gerst and Magnolia Road. Residents along Gerst Avenue opposed the plan, saying traffic is already too heavy and that they worry about stormwater flowing to their homes.

Even though the developers of Mohrs Legacy LLC reduced the number of units from the 62 originally planned and changed the access road, Councilman David Marks opted not to change the zoning to allow the project because the community opposed it. Marks downzoned 4,900 acres in this CZMP, the most of any councilman. The council spent nearly two hours on Marks’ issues because, he said, the planning board did not listen to what his constituents wanted and so he overruled the board.

Lutherville Station

Perhaps no development has been more contentious in Baltimore County during this CZMP than Lutherville Station.

Developer Mark Renbaum’s proposal to put hundreds of apartments on the site of a vacant shopping center ran into opposition from neighbors in Historic Lutherville, who thought the project was too dense. Renbaum then proposed even more apartments, with the most recent plan calling for as many as 560 units.

Kach ultimately concluded the developer was not engaging with the community in “good faith.” He knocked the zoning down to 16 units per one acre, which only allows Renbaum to build 208 units. Renbaum, however, requested the project be designated as a “transit oriented development,” or TOD, which under state law would allow him to increase the number of apartments because Lutherville Station is on the Light Rail and the state is trying to encourage more residents to use public transit.

Jake Day, secretary of the Department and Housing and Community Development, said before the zoning vote that the state enthusiastically backs Renbaum’s application for the TOD.

“I would be hard-pressed to invent a TOD from whole cloth that checks as many boxes for economic development, employment, and community benefit as this project does,” Day wrote in a letter to County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr.

Lutherville Station is one of the few projects where the CZMP is not the final word. State support for the project could usurp local authority.

305 W. Chesapeake Ave. office building

With the office market cooling because so many employees now work from home, the owners of 305 W. Chesapeake had hoped Councilman Mike Ertel would change their zoning. He did, but not in the direction they had hoped.

The owners will not be able to convert the building to residences or a hotel under Ertel’s zoning, which is now residential office. West Towson and Southland Hills residents showed up in droves to protest any change to a building they considered “illegal” because it is basically an office building in the middle of a residential street.

Ertel had said previously he didn’t want to rezone it without a plan from the developers for the building. Now, they will have at least four more years of not needing to worry that the building will change in any way.

Church Lane hair salon

Of all the developments in the Pikesville area, Patoka never would have guessed that the most contentious issue of 2024 would be a hair salon in a small shopping center. The council chair had to hold a separate meeting on the 2.6-acre property, which also includes a real estate company’s office. The property is zoned residential/office. Patoka assigned a representative from each side to come up with a solution; he plans to introduce a bill to codify the compromise they landed on.