Now that the Town of New Market has successfully annexed Adventure Park USA, county officials have dropped the zoning issues they had with the roller coaster.
But the park may not be out of the legal woods.
On Jan. 15, the Maryland Comptroller of the Treasury cited park owner Larry Stottlemyer for not having a business license or a license to operate a restaurant at the park, according to court documents.
Stottlemyer is scheduled to appear in court to answer these charges on April 30, and both offenses carry a penalty of a $300 fine and⁄or 30 days in jail, according to the citation.
He did not return calls for comment on the citations before The Gazette’s deadline Wednesday, and court documents did not provide details into the citations.
Adventure Park had a squabble with Frederick County in 2006 over the roller coaster.
Commissioner Jan H. Gardner (D), president of the Frederick Board of County Commissioners, said the park never received a building permit for the roller coaster, nor did it receive special exception to operate a roller coaster in the industrial zone, the county’s zoning designation for Adventure Park.
‘‘Roller coasters are not a permitted use in the industrial zoning category,” she said. ‘‘[Adventure Park] didn’t go through the process, and didn’t get a building permit for the roller coaster.”
In an interview Tuesday, Stottlemyer maintained that the Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation had jurisdiction over amusement parks, and that the county did not even have a building permit for a roller coaster.
‘‘The county and Adventure Park disagreed over who had the jurisdiction to inspect the roller coaster,” he said.
Stottlemyer said that in late 2006, the state inspected the park for about a week, and during that time performed thorough safety tests on the roller coaster.
‘‘The state is not going to let us operate a roller coaster that’s not safe,” he said.
Michael Chomel, an attorney for Frederick County, said the county cited Stottlemyer for building the roller coaster without proper zoning, but he said the citation had been dropped when the park was annexed into New Market.
He said that the citation — a fine that could have been levied against the park — never went to court. The county uses the threat of such fines to bring property owners into compliance, not to punish, Chomel said.
Once the park was moving toward annexation into New Market in December 2006, Chomel said the county suspended the citation. ‘‘As long as they’re moving through the process, we’re not going to sanction them,” he said.
The annexation process took about 18 months because of a challenge issued by nearby property owner, Intercoastal Industrial Center, which alleged that Stottlemyer violated an agreement with them not to seek annexation into the town.
Once that process ended, Chomel said the county dropped its citation.
Stottlemyer said he agreed to annexation because the town’s amusement park tax is lower than the county’s, and New Market had created amusement park zoning specifically for Adventure Park.
This would allow Stottlemyer to add a water park, and give better access to water and sewer resources, he said. ‘‘It suits the needs of Adventure Park to be annexed into [New Market],” he said. ‘‘Now that we have been annexed into the amusement park zone, the conflict that Adventure Park and the county had is not an issue.”
The Town of New Market also stands to gain from the annexation.
According to Mayor Winslow Burhans III, the town had been working toward the annexation for years to diversify the tax base. The town will draw an estimated $140,000 per year in revenue from the amusement park.
