Amusement owners fear zoning encroachment

Recent city zoning decisions regarding wave machines, and an upcoming decision over a haunted house, seem to sparked an unusual turf war between amusement operators.

During this week’s Planning and Zoning Commission meeting, local attorney Pete Cosby pitched the idea of a text amendment to clarify exactly what kind of amusement establishments be allowed in the resort, and where.

The idea, Cosby said, would be to have the city’s rather vague definitions fall more in line with those found in the state code (Code of Maryland Annotated Regulations, or COMAR), and limit such establishments to amusement overlay zones, as Cosby suggested had been the original intent of the city’s zoning code.

“We have a zoning code that defines an amusement park and creates it as an overlay district,” Cosby said. “All we do is redefine the code to simply say that any amusement device as defined by COMAR must be in an amusement park.”

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