The Carroll County Board of Commissioners met on November 20, 2025, for an open session that included approval of multiple administrative items, policy adoptions, and grant applications, followed by a work session on age-restricted housing regulations. The meeting covered the Operational Stability Reserve Policy, Community Reinvestment and Repair Fund (CRRF) purpose areas, Local Workforce Impact Fund, energy modernization grant, solid waste code revisions, Fire/EMS spending and training contracts, food service contract renewal, Board of Health fee changes, and bond sale award. The afternoon work session focused on potential improvements to the county’s age-restricted housing code, including density, design, access, and amenities.
Commissioners and staff discussed potential revisions to the county’s code for age-restricted housing, specifically Retirement Villages and Retirement Homes. Key topics included:
Great. Are we good? Yes, sir. Thank you. So good afternoon. So we're here to this afternoon to talk about age restricted housing. And the the purpose of today is to give some history about how the county has addressed age restricted housing over the years. And then um there have been some concerns about um how we're currently handling it. And so what I'd like to do is walk through um some of the things that I've heard that are concerns about um this type of development and and look at individual uh requirements and um and look at examples and then talk through what are the the um types of things that you would like us to look into to potentially revise code. So that will hopefully give us clear direction as far as um these are the items that we need to look at to make sure that we can improve what aid restricted housing looks like through the county. So um yes, yes, sir. Does everybody know everybody? Um we can certainly do introductions if we're good, we're good. Okay, just don't know you. Yes, I just don't know you. So I guess I guess by the shirt. I have my name. That's only 'cause in case you forget it, right? So uh no, that's fine. So just to start off, exactly what is restricted housing and um this is uh covered in um federal law and state law. Uh there's the housing for older persons act, which um works with the Fair Housing um Act as and it basically allows for um relaxing some of the requirements from the family type requirements related to uh housing and the the fair housing um act. Um essentially it requires at least eighty percent of the occupied units to have at least one person who is fifty-five or older. So that's the general rule. Uh what's important to note is that this is in federal law, it's in state law. Uh we do not have anything related to it in in county code because we're not required to um administer or enforce or anything like that, right? So if there is a complaint about whether um a business has been designated as um age restricted, um that would go to the state, the county would not be involved in it. We don't we do not have to enforce this. So um we do not specifically have a definition for age restricted housing as a as a term, but we have a couple of uses that fall under that category. So I want to touch on those real quick. So the first is retirement home. So think of retirement home as multi-family housing. So it's in a condo building where you have units within the building. So that's a retirement home. Examples be a recent example would be the 44 Liberty that's just off of Cleaves Mill and Maryland 26. So that's that's a retirement home example. What is bright view? Right view. Well, it's independent living as well. So it's but is that under this or is that they do more? Yeah, so that may actually fall under another definition I'll get to in a minute. Yep. So then we have retirement village, which think in terms of age restricted housing as in single family housing, right? So town homes, duplexes, single family homes, and and so on. Um what's important to note is that um from uh from looking at in a retirement village, you will see houses that are closer together, so they are kind of clustered together as a general term, but this is very different than a cluster subdivision because these are sites. This is picture a think in terms of like a um like what am I trying to think of here? Uh like a strip mall type site, but instead of stores, you have homes, right? It's all one site. Now the individual dwellings may be owned by individual property owners, it like a condo, but the property, overall property itself is owned by a management company. Um so all of the utilities, the roads, those are all privately owned and maintained. Okay, so it's different from a subdivision.