Colony Apartment Owners Propose Upzoning

Community leaders will meet with representatives of the Colony at Kenilworth apartment complex on Wednesday, after word surfaced that owners proposed controversial new zoning for the property.

Denver-based Aimco submitted a request to upzone the property, according to Jeff Mayhew, the county's director of community planning. The Colony had been raised as a zoning issue by County Councilman David Marks, who proposed no zoning change, as part of the county's quadrennial rezoning process.

Marks to generate discussion about future land use.

The 24-acre complex on Kenilworth Drive is currently zoned for residential use, nearly all of it at 16 units per acre. The proposed rezoning would include 4.5 acres of business local, 8.74 acres of high-density residential apartments (at 40 units per acre) and a small sliver of residential at 3.5 units per acre.

Representatives of Aimco could not be reached for comment Tuesday, but officials from the company will be meeting Wednesday with leaders from Riderwood Hills, West Towson and the Greater Towson Council of Community Associations, at the request of Marks.

Trish Mayhugh, the president of the Riderwood Hills Community Association, said the plan sounds a bit familiar to her. In the last rezoning cycle, as the Towson Times reported in 2007, the then-owners filed a request for upzoning, which was later denied.

Any plan that would allow more retail and high-rise apartments, she said, would lead to more traffic than Kenilworth Drive can handle. She also worries that approving an upzoning request for the Colony would set a bad precedent for the several other complexes on Kenilworth Drive that could follow.

"Then we'll be sitting on a Manhattan street. It'll just be six stories straight up and our trees will be gone. It's just not the place for it," she said.

At a zoning work session on Tuesday evening, the zoning request was approved simultaneously with numerous other requests in the 5th district. Nancy Hafford, a planning board member from Towson, said she considered making the request a separate issue, but did not want to interfere with the outcome of the Wednesday meeting.

The vote on Tuesday is non-binding—final votes on all rezoning requests are set for May 3. 

And ultimately, any upzoning on the property would have to be approved by the County Council.

"I will not support any change in the zoning unless there's a covenant agreement with the neighborhood," Marks said.

That's an agreement Mayhugh would be unlikely to sign.

"To have that behemoth sitting there within 12 feet of Kenilworth Drive going up six stories, that is not in the spirit of the neighborhood," she said.