Another voice has joined the debate over a West Baltimore grocery store project seeking permission for significantly more parking spaces than permitted under city code.

Former Baltimore Zoning Board Executive Director Rebecca Witt has weighed in with a statement to the City Council opposing it.

In a four-page letter, Witt challenges the marketplace rationale offered by MCB Real Estate, whose lawyer warned that the prospective tenant at 600 West North Avenue, Streets Market, will pull out unless variances for 65 off-street and six on-street parking spaces are granted.

Under city code, Witt wrote, variances are to be granted only “in cases of a site-specific practical difficulty, not a generalized business preference.”

“The claimed difficulty arises from discretionary decisions made by the developer and prospective tenant regarding store size, internal circulation, and parking layout as well as from reliance on suburban parking standards that the city has explicitly rejected through its recently updated parking maximums,” she noted.

The reference was to last year’s controversial Bill 25-0065, which removes the requirement that apartment developers provide off-street parking as part of their projects.

Witt, who supported that and other bills in Mayor Brandon Scott’s package of housing legislation, called MCB’s variance request “functionally a policy objection” to the parking maximums the legislation created.

“If granted here, this variance would effectively establish a precedent that any sufficiently large retail user may exceed parking maximums by invoking anticipated demand,” she wrote, thereby “collapsing the distinction between legislative standards and case-by-case relief” and undermining the city code and its comprehensive planning goals.

Testifying before the Council’s Land Use and Transportation Committee last Thursday, MCB attorney Drew Tildon said the developer’s request was based on “the industry standard for grocery stores in this type of area – 4.6 spaces per 1,000 feet of gross floor area.”

Washington, D.C.-based Streets Market “has been very flexible,” Tildon said, but no other grocer could be attracted with such a ratio.

Witt challenged that assumption, saying it “is derived from suburban land-use models developed in an era of abundant land, segregated uses and universal automobile dependence.”

“Such standards are not based on observed urban travel behavior, but rather on peak suburban demand,” she argued.

Tildon also noted the site’s proximity to an I-83 interchange and described the area as having insufficient density to provide enough customers for the grocery store, despite being under active redevelopment by MCB’s Reservoir Square project.

Witt took issue with this argument as well.

“Many properties along North Avenue and throughout the city are adjacent to I-83 or other limited-access highways,” she wrote. “That condition is not peculiar to this parcel, and no factual evidence has been presented demonstrating that this proximity creates parking demand materially different from other sites along the corridor.”

Not Intended for the Westside?

Her comments come in the midst of a controversy that has attracted attention in part because of the close ties of the developer – MCB Managing Director P. David Bramble – to Mayor Brandon Scott.

His company’s request is seen as something of a test of City Hall’s willingness to enforce sweeping new zoning rules on an insider like Bramble.

Witt, who headed the Board of Municipal and Zoning Appeals (BMZA) from 2023 to 2025, submitted her letter the night before a hearing that included testimony from multiple residents objecting to what MCB wants the city to approve at the site.

Most controversial was the company’s request that a portion of the dedicated curbside bus lane on North Avenue be converted to six parking spots in front of the grocery store.

• Parking-averse City Council is put to the test as prominent developer asks for more of it (5/4/26)

Much of the opposition at the hearing focused on the traffic congestion and crashes residents say will ensue if the company’s parking and other variances are approved.

But the legal argument Witt makes – that MCB’s request fails to meet the standard for a variance – was also raised, notably by Community Law Center Attorney Christina Schoppert-Devereaux.

“While the developer would no doubt like commuters on 83 to frequent the development, the siting of the project next to 83 is not a circumstance that warrants a variance,” said Schoppert-Devereaux, who represented the Historic Mount Royal Terrace Association.

“While the most forceful argument in favor of this project has been the necessity of a grocery store along the WNADA [West North Avenue Development Authority] corridor, the argument in favor of the increased parking is the siting next to 83,” she said, pointing out that “the residents of WNADA’s 16 neighborhoods will not use 83 to access this grocery store.”

Because many residents in the corridor lack access to cars and use the bus, she observed, “this incongruency gives the impression that the intended market for this grocery store is not actually the residents of West North Avenue.”

“Veneer of neutrality”

Beyond the question of a grocery store project’s parking configuration, MCB’s variance request is raising the profile of a number of larger issues, including how well the city is managing roadway improvements on West North Avenue, a busy east-west thoroughfare as well as the de facto Main Street for a number of historically disinvested residential neighborhoods.

The dedicated bus lanes there were installed as part of the North Avenue Rising project, completed in 2022. The $27.3 million project included funding from a $10 million U.S. Department of Transportation TIGER Grant and an additional $1.6 million from the Federal Highway Administration

Another issue, raised by Witt and others, is that the prominent developer’s variance request revives is a critique of the “conditional use” process it is using to seek it.

In Baltimore, a conditional use is a land use that is not automatically allowed “by right” in a particular zoning district, but may be permitted if it meets specific conditions designed to ensure it is compatible with the surrounding neighborhood.

Sponsored by council members as an ordinance and generally decided by the Zoning Board, conditional use requests can be deferred to the City Council, which is what has happened in the MCB case.

“The more I see of the conditional use by ordinance process [having seen it both from within and from the outside], the more convinced I am that it’s a terrible tool,” said Witt who, before taking a city job heading the Zoning Board, represented residents as an attorney for the Community Law Center.

“In practice, it depends on whether a council member is willing to introduce the bill to begin the conditional use process – that’s actually illegal,” she wrote in additional comments to The Brew this morning.

Noting that the conditional use process is meant to be quasi-judicial, Witt said the council member theoretically should introduce one “regardless of what the member individually thinks, but that’s not what happens when a project is unpopular with constituents.”

“What I see instead is a political or legislative process with only a thin veneer of neutrality,” she observed, calling for the city to end the process and send all cases to the Zoning Board.

“Its members aren’t politically beholden to constituents, and they are much better positioned to apply the law neutrally,” she said. “They have real experience with fact finding, legal conclusions, and deliberation and they don’t engage in ex parte communications about cases before them.”