Calvert County Zoning: The Cove Point LNG Exemption Fight

In 2013, Calvert County's own Commissioners tried something no other Maryland jurisdiction has attempted: writing a single industrial use -- a liquefied natural gas terminal -- entirely out of the zoning ordinance. A circuit court judge struck the move down a year later as unconstitutional. The plant got built anyway, under federal rather than local authority, and has been shipping LNG from Lusby since 2018.

This page covers what's specific to Calvert County. For the general explanation, see the national guide.

Ordinance 46-13: writing one industrial use out of the zoning code

In 2013, facing Dominion's proposal to convert its existing Cove Point import terminal in Lusby into a full liquefaction and export facility, the Calvert County Board of County Commissioners and Planning Commission passed Ordinance 46-13 -- a text amendment carving liquefied natural gas import and export facilities out of the zoning ordinance's normal use restrictions entirely, rather than approving the project through the standard rezoning, special-exception, or site-plan review process every other use in the county goes through. The Planning Commission voted 4-1 to recommend the exemption, and the Commissioners voted 4-1 to adopt it.

That move didn't survive legal challenge. In August 2014, a Calvert County Circuit Court judge ruled that Ordinance 46-13 violated both a provision of Maryland's Land Use Article and the state constitution's requirement that zoning apply uniformly, striking the exemption down. The judge's own language was pointed: no other municipality or county in Maryland had ever attempted to completely exempt a specific land use from the zoning regulations that applied to everyone else in the jurisdiction. For a land buyer, that ruling is worth understanding on its own terms -- it's a rare, real precedent establishing that a Maryland county cannot simply legislate a single favored project out of its own zoning code, no matter how large or economically significant that project is.

Built anyway: why federal law controlled the outcome

Despite the zoning ordinance's invalidation, the Cove Point liquefaction project proceeded essentially on schedule: construction began in October 2014, immediately after Dominion secured its core federal approvals from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and U.S. Department of Energy in September 2014, and the facility began commercial LNG deliveries in April 2018. The explanation isn't that Calvert County found another way around the court ruling -- it's that Section 3(e) of the federal Natural Gas Act gives FERC exclusive authority to approve the siting, construction, and operation of an LNG import or export terminal, a preemption of state and local zoning authority that federal courts have separately upheld in other jurisdictions' disputes over LNG facilities. Calvert County's own Office of the County Attorney has documented this limitation directly, in an internal memo on the county's own website addressing the general limits of county zoning power. In practical terms, the local zoning fight over Ordinance 46-13 turned out to matter less to whether Cove Point got built than it might have for almost any other kind of large industrial use -- because for this one specific category of facility, federal law, not county zoning, was always going to be the controlling authority.

The finished facility is genuinely large by any Maryland standard: the new liquefaction plant sits on 59.5 acres within Dominion's existing 131-acre fenced industrial site at Cove Point, with 14.6 billion cubic feet of LNG storage capacity, up to 5.75 million metric tonnes per year of export capacity, and a daily send-out capacity of 1.8 billion cubic feet, per Maryland DNR's own Power Plant Research Program fact sheet on the facility.

What this means for land near Cove Point -- and what remains unconfirmed

For anyone evaluating land in or near Lusby and the Cove Point peninsula, the practical takeaway is that this stretch of Calvert County carries a heavy-industrial land use and buffer footprint unlike anywhere else in the county, or arguably anywhere else in Maryland -- a large energy-export facility whose siting and operation are governed primarily by federal rather than county authority. That has real, concrete implications worth confirming directly rather than assuming: proximity restrictions, safety buffer zones, noise, and truck/marine traffic patterns tied to the facility are set substantially by federal (FERC/PHMSA) safety and siting requirements rather than by the county zoning map alone, which is a meaningfully different regulatory picture than a typical industrial-zoned parcel elsewhere in Calvert.

One honest gap in this research pass: county-level, WebSearch-indexed sourcing did not clearly establish exactly what zoning classification or permitting mechanism formally governs the Cove Point site today, more than a decade after Ordinance 46-13's invalidation -- whether that's a subsequent, narrower county zoning action, a special exception granted through the ordinary Board of Appeals process, or simply reliance on the site's pre-existing industrial zoning plus federal preemption for the specific LNG-terminal use. A buyer evaluating land near the facility, or considering any development that might be affected by its buffer requirements, should confirm the current zoning designation and any applicable buffer or setback requirements directly with the Calvert County Department of Planning & Zoning rather than relying on this history alone.

Zoning in Calvert County, Maryland: The Cove Point LNG Exemption Fight

Ordinance 46-13: writing one industrial use out of the zoning code

Built anyway: why federal law controlled the outcome

What this means for land near Cove Point -- and what remains unconfirmed

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