HCPSS MPIA Request #2022-069

Requestor
Jesse M. Chancellor
Organization/Agency
Gaither Farm Homeowners' Association
Requested Information
Under the Maryland Public Information Act, the Gaither Farm Homeowners' Association is requesting transcripts or copies of all communications between HCPSS and the HoCo By Design planning effort, including with other agencies or instrumentalities of Howard County government, that took place between the dates of 1/1/2018 and 11/28/2021 concerning the proposed expansion of the Planned Service Area (PSA) at the HCPSS headquarters properties on Route 108. Specifically, please provide the documents related to HCPSS-owned parcels 0099, 0322 and 0100.
Date Received
Status
Complete
Response Notes

Responsive to this request, HCPSS staff who have attended subcommittees of the General Plan/HoCo By Design indicate they do not have transcripts or records of communications from those meetings. As this effort falls under the Howard County Department of Planning and Zoning, information on submission of an MPIA request for that agency’s records can be found here: https://www.howardcountymd.gov/PIA. 

Additionally, HCPSS staff in the Office of School Planning (OSP) indicated any communications with HoCo By Design/Howard County government staff concerning Planned Service Areas would be found in email records. Following an initial search of @hcpss.org mailboxes and your response indicating “Our goal is to understand how portions of the HCPSS headquarters site, that are not currently within the Public Service Area “(PSA”), came to be included in the proposed expansion of the PSA within the current draft of the HoCo by Design plan. Specifically, we are primarily interested in the proposed expansion of public sewer and water to parcel 0322. We only want to see the specific correspondence related to that process and primarily related to that parcel,” our Office of School Planning reached out via email with background on the process. Per a follow-up request to receive correspondence of the Office of School Planning related to “the request that included Parcel 0322 in the PSA expansion” we conducted a search of email correspondence for OSP staff where the participants included @howardcountymd.gov between January 1, 2018, and November 28, 2021, for keywords “PSA” or “Plan(ned) Service Area,” AND “0322” or “Central” or “Headquarters” or “Homewood” or “ARL,” and have been unable to locate a record of a specific request to include Parcel 0322 in the PSA expansion. This includes correspondence of prior Office of School Planning staff in place back to the January 1, 2018, date. For reference, current staff in the Office of School Planning indicates the request to enable future options for the property – referenced in their December 22, 2021, email response – was communicated verbally through HCPSS participation in subcommittees of the General Plan/HoCo By Design. As stated above, HCPSS does not have transcripts or records of communications from those meetings.

*Some request language is summarized to include the requester's specific document requests and legally protected information (such as personally identifiable information of a student) or personal, defamatory and malicious content removed at the discretion of the school system.

**Responses containing legally protected information available only to the person of interest are omitted from the above report.

***Howard County Public Schools reserves the right to remove erroneous or outdated documents from this site.