March 28, 2024

Battle of AICUZ; Coming to a Theater Near You

By Viki Volk
Publisher

If the struggle to recapitalize Lexington Park, Md., was considered a war, no doubt an infamous battle would be named AICUZ.

Map by St. Mary's County Dept. of Land Use and Growth Management

Map by St. Mary’s County Dept. of Land Use and Growth Management

The military acronym represents shadows cast by an aircraft risk calculation, establishing a likely crash zone if there were a crash. The zone is something of an Achilles’ heel for a naval air station.  The more people congregated in the shadow of the heel, the worse the station’s position in its program budget battles.

On the other side of the fence, the AICUZ also shadows the fortunes of the properties it cloaks. In Lexington Park, the AICUZ covers a tad more than 1,000 acres, nearly 800 properties.

The zone injures a property’s ability to leverage money to develop, expand, or improve. Think about a Monopoly game where some players can borrow and others cannot. No matter how good your first moves, if you can’t get access to as much capital as your opponents you will lose.

If revitalization is a war, the Battle of AICUZ is firing up again; another county effort at a land-use plan for Lexington Park is stoking the flames. In the upcoming months, maps and charts and chatter will cover board tables and fill public hearing rooms.

The bottom lines: A naval air station does not want congregations of people in a potential crash zone. And the county’s economy is roughly 80 percent dependent on the naval air station.

The historic compromise: Prohibit new development in the AICUZ shadow and allow existing properties to continue to operate at the size and intensity they are now. This, however, does not lift the onus on financing.

Even public ownership failed to leverage financing in the AICUZ. The county purchased and demolished a 91-acre housing development from the AICUZ prior to the 2005 BRAC. The cleared property retained roads, sewer and water systems and offered potential tax incentives and still failed to secure a redevelopment proposal.

The abandoned neighborhood, instead of reverting to an empty field of cows as some cynics claim is all the Navy wants in an AICUZ, has reverted to an empty neighborhood of crumbling roads, renowned cherry trees from Japan and homeless men living in the brush.

The AICUZ properties are a linchpin in Lexington Park. The zone shadows Millison Plaza and numerous other successful,  commercial mainstays at the perimeter of the Navy base. As go their property fortunes so goes Lexington Park. Without viable enterprise in that area, it won’t turn into a cow field either.

There were 800 properties in the AICUZ as of 2011. They were assessed at a total value of $240 million which would have pulled in roughly $2 million in county property taxes that year, which anticipated a total of $101 million countywide. That’s about 2 percent of the property taxes on 1,000 acres out of a county of more than 485,000 acres.

They are undoubtedly worth a great deal more than these metrics. They are certainly worth no less. It is self-defeating to continue to devalue them, whether in a fell swoop like the 91-acre Flattops housing or chipped away through deterioration, whether for gain on this side of the fence or that. Nobody wins that way.

 

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