HARFORD COUNTY, Maryland — Maryland hasn’t gained a new municipal government in more than two decades. That isn’t especially unusual for the mid-Atlantic, but Maryland’s dry spell is not for lack of trying.
Since the start of the new millennium, residents in more than a dozen unincorporated communities have taken steps toward forming a new local government. But Maryland law doesn’t make that path easy: County governments have the final say on municipal incorporation requests, and those governments almost always say no.
Edgewood, a community with some 25,000 residents near the southernmost corner of Harford County, is home to Maryland’s most persistent movement for municipal incorporation. It’s younger and lower-income than much of Harford County, and as of 2023, it’s the county’s only plurality African-American community.
For the past three years, state lawmakers representing Edgewood have attempted to bring the community’s incorporation fight to Annapolis. Those efforts have yet to yield results, but they have reopened a conversation about the value of local government.
Del. Steve Johnson, a Democrat whose Harford County district includes Edgewood, says the roadblocks to Edgewood’s incorporation are the product of a decades-old effort to place greater power in the hands of local government.
“In 1954, the state transferred the authority to approve municipal incorporation to the counties,” he told Capital News Service. “At that time, they felt the counties would have [more of] a finger on the pulse.”
That shift required an amendment to Maryland’s constitution, and both then-Gov. Theodore McKeldin and the Maryland Municipal League lobbied voters to support the amendment, arguing that it would lighten the General Assembly’s workload and allow state lawmakers to focus on more pressing concerns.
But municipalities receive a portion of the tax dollars collected by their counties, giving county governments little incentive to approve new municipalities at the cost of revenue used to pay for county services.
“The system in Maryland is fundamentally broken,” said Justin Fiore, deputy director of advocacy and public affairs for the Maryland Municipal League, which today supports reforming municipal incorporation rules.
Current law allows county councils to decide unilaterally whether to hold a referendum on the formation of a new municipality. A reform bill before the General Assembly earlier this year – sponsored by Johnson – would have required county councils to approve referendum requests if 40 percent or more of the registered voters in the proposed municipality sign a petition.
A majority of Marylanders live in so-called “census-designated places”: unincorporated communities, often with population densities comparable to incorporated suburbs, that the Census Bureau treats as a town- or city-equivalent in its surveys. Those include Columbia in Howard County; Silver Spring in Montgomery County; and Waldorf in Charles County, all of which lack local governments.
Only in Hawaii do a larger share of residents live in census-designated places.
Testifying in support of the reform bill earlier this year, Fiore argued that the relative lack of local governments in Maryland is more likely a product of restrictive incorporation rules than a lack of interest from today’s Marylanders.
“Unless the general assembly wants to take back the authority to create municipalities, we’re asking for a better balance at the local level so that one form of government can’t just keep saying no to the other,” he said.
Edgewood’s incorporation movement has appeared in fits and starts for more than two decades. While the organizers have changed, the fundamentals of their case for local control have not.
“What they’ve seen for years and years is their tax dollars being collected and then being spent elsewhere in the county,” Johnson said. “There’s no reinvestment.”
Both Johnson and Harford County Councilmember Nolanda Robert, whose district includes Edgewood, point to the examples of Aberdeen and Havre de Grace.
The two incorporated towns are only a few miles east of Edgewood along U.S. Route 40. Both formed municipal governments before the turn of the last century, and both now operate their own police, public works, and planning departments.
Without a municipal police department, Johnson argues that Edgewood’s residents, who share a police department with the rest of unincorporated Harford County, don’t experience the benefits of community policing.
Without a zoning department to control local land use, he added, “whatever they don’t want up in Jarrettsville, Fallston, or Bel Air all gets dumped on Edgewood.”
And without a municipal government to apply for federal COVID relief grants, Robert said, Edgewood didn’t receive the economic stimulus available to its incorporated counterparts.
Del. Andre Johnson, the other Democrat representing Edgewood in Maryland’s House of Delegates, previously held Robert’s county council. Advocating for the district’s interests, he said, was always an uphill battle. “You’re always being outvoted and outnumbered,” he told CNS.
On a tour through Edgewood in March, Robert pointed out dilapidated rental housing, trash-strewn basketball courts, and a string of vacant storefronts. “If you go to Aberdeen or Havre de Grace, they have a plethora of places to go and things for families to do,” she said. “We don’t have anything.”
In Robert’s view, incorporation offers both tangible and intangible benefits for Edgewood. With a municipal government, she argued, Edgewood residents could exercise greater control over how a portion of their tax dollars are spent – possibly on improved garbage service, recreational spaces or economic development programs. A cluster of hotels along Route 40 would also give an incorporated Edgewood access to a share of the county’s hotel occupancy tax revenue.
But she also argues that incorporation could be a tool to increase civic participation. “When I go door-knocking, a lot of people feel they don’t have a voice in the government,” she said. Organizing a local government, she added, would offer residents a more direct way to interact with, and feel heard by, elected officials.
But Robert underscores that an incorporated Edgewood could take a gradual approach to building local services. “Maybe we start with choosing a mayor and council,” she said, and a single municipal agency like a police department. “We don’t have to do everything at once.”
Harford County Executive Bob Cassilly, however, argues that incorporation would do more harm than good for Edgewood’s residents.
Cassilly previously represented southern Harford County as a Republican in the state Senate, and he agrees that Edgewood long suffered from neglect by county leadership. “I did feel that the county has not dealt a fair card over the years to the Edgewood area,” he told CNS.
But given Edgewood’s relatively lower median household income, Cassilly contends that the community likely couldn’t afford the additional tax burden needed to cover the costs of municipal government.
“That’s a lot of overhead, because now you’re going to have to have a municipal building, municipal employees, municipal staff,” he said. “I don’t know [if] that is in the best interest of the Edgewood community.”
Instead, Cassilly points to the Southern County Taskforce, a project his administration launched in 2023 to focus the county’s attention on quality-of-life concerns in the Edgewood area. The taskforce has since spurred the county to adjust its zoning code to enable stricter penalties for absentee landlords, replace street lights and sidewalks, and purchase a dedicated street-sweeping vehicle for the area.
He believes Edgewood wouldn’t have been able to afford some of those improvements on its own. “Edgewood needs to be part of this big county that can afford to look at Edgewood’s special needs, recognize the potential over there, and invest in Edgewood,” he said.
If those investments aren’t enough, he added, “the solution is for the community to just stand up and say, ‘here are our ideas,’ work through their council representatives, and vote.”
The Maryland Association of Counties is similarly skeptical of the benefits of municipal incorporation – particularly if state-level reforms spurred a wave of new municipalities across Maryland.
Michael Sanderson, the association’s executive director, says his primary concern is the impact of municipalities on the services available to their unincorporated neighbors.
“There are a pretty wide range of things that counties provide and municipalities don’t,” Sanderson said. Those often include public education and local jails, which counties pay for with the portion of local tax revenues not set aside for municipal governments.
He also argues that municipal control over land use and zoning can pose problems for county services. “A county can say, ‘Our schools are overcrowded. We shouldn’t be growing in this corner of the county,’” he said. “But if you’re an independent town in that corner of the county, you can effectively just ignore that and do what you want to do.”
The knock-on effects of new municipalities increase with the size of the incorporated community, Sanderson added. But a significant number of smaller incorporations could also have downstream impacts.
“There’s the potential for some unwise balkanization,” he said. “You could see lots of places in Montgomery County or Anne Arundel County saying, ‘Wow, if we were a municipality, we’d get all this money back. We don’t have to support that poor school on the other side of the county that they’re trying to build next.’”
Sanderson believes there may be a middle ground. “You can create a special taxing district that, for all intents and purposes, looks and feels like a city or like a town,” he said, raising the example of Crofton in Anne Arundel County. “You can name it, the village of something, and you can elect the mayor, and you can do virtually all the things that an incorporated municipality can do.”
But his organization’s opposition to incorporation reform as proposed this year boils down to one core objection. “If you live next door or in another part of the county, or your schools or your services would be affected by incorporation, you need to have a voice in the process,” he said.
Back in Harford, Robert says that while the proposed reforms have stalled, the General Assembly’s consideration of the issue has meant greater attention on Edgewood. “When they hear the rumbling,” she said, “they focus more on [us] here.”