What Prince George鈥檚 County, Maryland, lacks in fine dining, the business community will tell you it makes up for in red tape.
The permitting process in the county has long been a complaint, and past efforts at reform haven鈥檛 had the intended impact.
On Tuesday, a majority of the Prince George鈥檚 County Council announced a package of new bills that aims to make it easier to lure more restaurants to the county, and make it easier for county residents to open and operate their businesses where they live.
The first part of the introduced package is a resolution that would create a task force aimed at figuring out why the permitting process in the county is so much slower than anywhere else in the region.
鈥淥ne of the things that we hear all of the time is that we do it slower than everywhere else,鈥� Council Chair Krystal Oriadha said. 鈥淏ut there’s a reality that we do want a fast process, but we don’t want a process that cuts out the community.鈥�
The task force will be made up of residents and business interests in the hopes of finding ways to improve efficiency in that department. Oriadha said large-scale redevelopment projects at the site of Six Flags and the Commanders stadium in Landover are opportunities to go big that can鈥檛 be slowed down by red tape.
鈥淥ne of the things we hear all the time is, 鈥業t’s going to take us twice as long to develop a project here than it is in neighboring jurisdictions,鈥欌�� she said.
鈥淪o part of what we’re doing right now is preparing for us to be competitive, to get the best possible projects when it comes to economic development.鈥�
Other bills aim to slash permitting fees for restaurants that have a dining room and provide more money from the Economic Development Incentive Fund to lure nice restaurants inside the Beltway.
鈥淭his is an area that wasn’t a priority for past leadership of the Economic Development Corporation,鈥� Oriadha said.
鈥淲e lose so much revenue to Virginia and to D.C. around restaurants and entertainment. Then we look at our largest tax base, when it comes to commercial development, is the National Harbor. It’s in hospitality, entertainment, restaurants and so I think that we have to diversify what we focus on.鈥�
Two other bills aim to bolster county-owned small businesses by giving them a 5% advantage on county contracts, and requiring 20% of all county government construction contracts to go to locally-owned and operated businesses.
鈥淎 lot of the complaints have been that our MBEs have the opportunity to be subcontractors, but they rarely have the opportunity to be prime contractors,鈥� Oriadha said.
鈥淪o what we’re doing, for the first time, is looking at actual set asides percentage to evaluate our ability to move into allowing for us to see more Black and brown contractors as prime contractors here in the county.鈥�
The bills were introduced Tuesday morning and passed an initial vote of the whole council later that afternoon.
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