Ask the people who filled out Calvert County's 2025 survey what should happen to the Huntingtown Town Center, and roughly six in ten said get rid of the label. Ask the same county planners fourteen months later, and that option no longer exists. In between, nothing was decided. The zoning designation that governs 81 parcels and about 304 acres along Route 4 is still open, and the county just restarted the conversation with a fresh kickoff meeting on September 15, 2026, eight days before this was written.
For anyone comparing Huntingtown against other Southern Maryland town centers right now, that gap between what residents voted for and what the county is willing to do matters more than the eventual outcome. It means a property sitting inside that mapped footprint today is sitting inside an active zoning question, not a settled one, and the reason the county backed away from the majority's preference says something specific about how these corridors actually work.
What The Survey Found, And What It Didn't Fix
Calvert County ran an online survey for the Huntingtown Town Center between July 23 and August 25, 2025, and 389 people completed it. The top priorities respondents named were land use, environmental protection, and parks and recreation. When asked whether the corridor should keep its Town Center zoning designation or convert to Rural Commercial, staff reported that roughly 60 percent favored the switch to Rural Commercial, while about 39 percent wanted to keep the current designation.
That split reads as a mandate for change. Residents also flagged traffic congestion, unsafe intersections, a lack of sidewalks, and vacant or turnover-prone storefronts as the corridor's biggest problems, all issues a Rural Commercial designation was supposed to help solve by scaling back what could be built there. Planning staff presented these results to the Planning Commission on September 17, 2025, and the commission voted to defer any action, asking staff instead to explain exactly what changing a designation would require procedurally before anyone moved further.
The Word That Stopped The Rezoning
The answer staff came back with in November 2025 was that converting to Rural Commercial would make several businesses that already operate legally in Huntingtown into nonconforming uses overnight. At a public meeting that October, business owner Michael Bresnahan, who said he had operated in Huntingtown for more than 30 years, put it directly to the county: "You realize you're eliminating several businesses that are already operational here?" He named auto dealerships, boat dealers, and self-storage facilities as uses that exist in the corridor now but would not be permitted under the Rural Commercial category residents had voted for.
Resident Tara Murphy asked the obvious follow-up: would existing businesses be grandfathered in? Staff's answer was that the county would try to avoid creating a large number of nonconforming properties, but that the actual definitions and permitted-use lists could still be adjusted depending on what the Planning Commission or Board of County Commissioners eventually directed. In other words, there was no guarantee attached to the survey result. On November 19, 2025, planning staff presented a recommendation to the Planning Commission to eliminate the Rural Commercial option entirely for Huntingtown, along with Owings and St. Leonard, specifically to avoid manufacturing that batch of nonconforming uses. No vote was taken. It was presented as information.
That single legal mechanic, nonconforming use, is why a survey majority didn't translate into a zoning change. A nonconforming use is one that was legal when established but falls outside what current zoning permits. Properties in that status typically can't expand the nonconforming use, often can't rebuild it the same way after a casualty loss past a certain damage threshold, and can complicate financing or insurance underwriting because lenders and insurers price uncertainty about a property's long-term legal use into their terms. Converting the whole corridor to Rural Commercial would have handed that status to an unknown number of parcels at once, which is what pushed the county to pull the option rather than let the vote stand.
The Restart
Here is the part that matters if you're looking at Huntingtown property today. The county's announcement for the September 15, 2026 meeting described it as the kickoff for the Huntingtown Town Center Master Plan Update. Planning records show the work began with a Planning Commission vote in July 2025 and has included the survey, the October 2025 public input session, and the November 2025 recommendation against Rural Commercial.
The September meeting continues a process that began in mid-2025, and it shows the county has not settled on a replacement designation. The options still on the table include keeping the current Town Center status, reintroducing a Minor Town Center category specifically for Huntingtown, or creating a new district built around the corridor's existing mixed-use pattern. None of those has been adopted. There is no rezoned map yet, and under Maryland's Land Use Article, once the Planning Commission does recommend a plan, the Board of County Commissioners is required to hold its own public hearing within 90 days of that recommendation. That clock hasn't started for Huntingtown.
The Priciest Corridor Is Also The Least Settled One
Calvert County's own March 2026 draft of the countywide Town Centers chapter put Huntingtown's median housing value at $593,500, the highest of any of the county's census-designated places, just ahead of Owings at $592,900 and well above Dunkirk's $557,700. The countywide median was $440,200, and the Maryland state median was $397,700. Huntingtown's average monthly mortgage payment in that same draft came in at $2,770, third-highest in the county behind St. Leonard and Owings.
Meanwhile, two of Huntingtown's neighboring corridors have already crossed the finish line. The Board of County Commissioners held a public hearing on the Prince Frederick and Dunkirk town center chapters on July 21, 2026, and voted to move toward formal adoption on August 4, 2026. Huntingtown, sitting on the county's most valuable residential base, is the one still working through a designation fight that started over a year ago and just got a public restart.
That's the part a median price alone won't tell a buyer. A higher home value doesn't come bundled with a settled zoning framework. In Huntingtown's case it's sitting on top of the one still unresolved.
What To Check Before You Write An Offer Here
If you're looking at a property inside or near the Huntingtown Town Center corridor, a few questions are worth asking before anything else:
- Is the parcel inside the mapped 81-parcel, roughly 304-acre town center footprint, or outside it? The zoning conversation only applies within that boundary.
- What is the property's current zoning district, and does the listed use match what's actually operating there? A commercial use established years ago may already be closer to nonconforming than a for-sale listing will tell you.
- If you're buying a commercial property or a business with real estate attached, ask directly whether that use type appears on the county's list of uses not permitted under a Rural Commercial designation. Staff's own comparison of permitted uses in the Town Center versus Rural Commercial district is public.
- Has a Planning Commission hearing been scheduled yet? As of the September 2026 kickoff meeting, it had not, which means the 90-day countdown to a Board of County Commissioners hearing hasn't begun either.
FAQ
Does this affect houses outside the Huntingtown town center corridor? No. The designation fight is specific to the mapped town center footprint along Route 4 and Old Town Road, not to residential subdivisions or farmland elsewhere in the Huntingtown area.
When will the county actually decide? There's no scheduled date. The process that started in July 2025 was still described by the county as a "kickoff" in September 2026, and no Planning Commission hearing has been set.
Is this the same issue as the farmette building-rights question in Huntingtown? No. That's a separate matter tied to Calvert County's transferable development rights program on agricultural land outside the town center. This is specifically about the commercial corridor's zoning designation.
What happens to a business currently operating legally if the designation does change? Planning staff have said they'll try to avoid creating large numbers of nonconforming uses, but no grandfathering language has been finalized. That's part of what's still being worked out.
Whether you're evaluating a storefront on Route 4 or a house a few streets back from it, the Huntingtown corridor is worth a conversation before it's worth an offer. The Beckman Group tracks these Calvert County planning updates as they happen, not after the fact, and can walk you through what a specific parcel's zoning status actually means before you're under contract. Let's connect and book an appointment.
