Cecil County Farm Museum to Abandon County-Owned Site; Wetlands Problems Cited
Organizers of the long-stalled Cecil County Farm Museum, proposed a decade ago for a Cherry Hill-area site, have told county officials they will give up their lease on the county-owned land and look for another location. That action will leave the county holding an 84-acre property with access and wetlands problems that is now worth much less than the county paid to buy it in 2002.
During their Tuesday worksession, county staff told the Board of Commissioners that the Cecil County Farm Museum, Inc., a non-profit group set up to build the museum, wants out of the rent-free 99-year lease that was signed in November, 2002. For over a year, the county has been dealing with problems caused when the museum group built a road that violated wetlands protection regulations, resulting in protests from the Army Corps of Engineers and the state Department of the Environment.
To fix environmental problems with the road could cost $250,000, which the group felt was too costly, so they decided it would be cheaper to rip out the road and restore the land to its previous condition, the commissioners were told. Then the group will abandon that site and look for another location.
That will leave the county holding property that is now worth significantly less than was paid for it. The property, at 123 Elk Mills Rd. near the Cherry Hill traffic circle, was purchased by the county on 1/15/02 for $594,000, according to state property records, from the family of Joseph Lanzi. The land is currently valued, as of 1/1/11, at $442,800. The property was acquired using state Rural Legacy land preservation funds and is subject to state preservation easements that will limit how it can be used in the future.
From the beginning, the Farm Museum project has been a hurry-up-and-wait proposition, rushed to land purchase just two months after the group first approached the County Commissioners with the idea. The project was pushed by former county Commissioner Phyllis Kilby, whose husband, Bill, is president of the Cecil Land Trust that was involved in the program.
Nearby Chesterfield-area homeowners protested the project almost from the beginning, saying that it lacked proper road access and that special events the museum organizers wanted to hold as fundraisers would cause serious traffic problems in the area. The fights went all the way up to the state Court of Appeals, which sided with the homeowners.
The Court of Appeals ruled in 2006 that the local Board of Zoning Appeals erred when it overruled a Planning Commission recommendation and did not consider community traffic concerns. Eventually, the local zoning panel brokered a deal that would limit the number of special events, such as tractor pulls, that could be held on the site to mitigate traffic problems.
“It was a bad location from the beginning” former county Commissioner Harry Hepbron told Cecil Times. He said he encouraged the museum group to look at other locations that had better road access or were closer to the Fair Hill nature area. But the two other Commissioners were for it, he said, and the state was providing the funds so it moved ahead.
A few months before the county acquired the property, a proposal from the Cecil Land Trust for state funds for a preservation easement on the Lanzi property was submitted to the Board of Public Works but then withdrawn, according to records of the 10/3/01 Board of Public Works meeting.
Then, a month later, representatives of the Farm Museum group showed up at the Cecil County Commissioners, saying in November 2001 that they had just formed a non-profit group and were interested in obtaining property in the Fair Hill area for a farm museum, meeting minutes show. Then, less than two months later, the county bought the Lanzi property.
At Tuesday’s worksession, Commissioner James Mullin (R-1) said that the “property will still have a beneficial use to the county” and he said its forested areas could be counted as “land bank” offsets to upcoming pollution limits required under state and federal Chesapeake Bay cleanup regulations.
But county staff noted there are other problems at the site, such as adjoining property owners encroaching on the county-owned land for grazing and other uses. Scott Flanigan, director of Public Works, volunteered to lead a team to evaluate potential uses for the property and deal with “encroachment issues” on the site.
The farm museum’s website is here: http://www.ccfarmmuseum.org/CCFM_Home_Page.html
