Howard bill backs electric vehicles
Council weighs requiring new communities to support charging stations
Howard County is considering a proposal to require new communities of singlefamily dwellings and apartment buildings to have infrastructure in place to support charging stations for electric vehicles.
Under the legislation proposed at the Howard County Council, communities without garages would be required to have the necessary wiring and other infrastructure to support one charging station for every 25 units.
“We are concerned about the environment and we think electric vehicles will help,” said Councilwoman Jen Terrasa, a Democrat who introduced the bill. “We have the capacity, or will have, to work toward getting the capacity to make the transition away from [gasoline] vehicles.”
Howard County’s chapter of the Maryland Building Industry Association is opposing the proposal, saying such issues should be handled at the state level.
Josh Greenfield, the association’s vice president of government affairs, said in a statement that the group believes local laws addressing such issues could prompt a “patchwork of competing and conflicting local EV laws [that] will lead to slower, less efficient uptake of EV technology while contributing to more costly housing stock.”
The MBIA also criticized the bill because it would apply to “new occupancies” — not new construction. Terrasa said she plans to amend the bill to make clear the rule is intended only for new properties.
The measure is scheduled to be discussed at the council’s next meeting, on Monday in Ellicott City. An amendment could change the schedule for its consideration.
Richard Lost, a BGE spokesman, said in an email that the utility company “supports all efforts to encourage the adoption of electric vehicles throughout the state of Maryland. EV charging infrastructure is necessary to help the state meet its goal of having 300,000 zero-emissions vehicles on the road by 2025.”
Terrasa’s bill is also supported by Josh Cohen, former mayor of Annapolis and now the director of policy and utility programs at SemaConnect, a Marylandbased electric vehicle infrastructure company.
The bill “is a forward-looking piece of legislation and there is precedent for it,” he wrote in a statement. “Cities across the country such as Atlanta, San Francisco and Fremont [Calif.] have passed ‘EV-ready’ ordinances to require varying percentages of parking spaces in new multi-family and commercial developments.”
New single-family homes in Atlanta also are required to have infrastructure to support electric vehicles stations, Cohen added.
Terrasa said her bill was partially inspired by a 2014 amendment to Montgomery County’s zoning code that requires some parking lots to maintain electric charging stations.
The type of charging stations being considered by the bill generally cost $10,000 to $40,000, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Equipping homes with infrastructure ranges from $100 to $1,000.
Howard County’s first public electric vehicle charging station was installed in Columbia in 2011.