Prince George’s Co. will study impact of stores that are ‘not good’ for local health
Some parts of Prince George’s County, Maryland, are well developed with million-dollar homes and easy access to nicer restaurants and grocery stores; other parts are not.
If you drive on certain roads, primarily inside the Capital Beltway, you’ll see no shortage of fast food and carry out spots, corner stores, tobacco marts and liquor stores. One stretch of Route 704 has two liquor stores right next to each other.
Now, Prince George’s County is trying to gather data on the health impact of those businesses and where they’re located.
“We have an oversaturation, especially in my community, of convenience stores, liquor stores, carry outs — the things that we don’t want to see in our community and that have a negative health impact in our community,” Prince George’s County Council Vice Chair Krystal Oriadha said.
“We really want to assess what are the impacts, and how is the government having to foot the bill for these industries. What are the health consequences?” she added.
It’s those neighborhoods that deal with higher rates of diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure, she said. In her mind, it’s no coincidence.
“We can see. We live here. We experience it every day. But we need the data. We need the facts,” she said.
The goal is to take the study and use it to craft future legislation that could govern zoning, even after active previous laws aimed at tobacco stores in particular. Oriadha is also interested in creating an impact fee that would be assessed on those businesses.
But those decisions need to be backed by data, Oriadha said, “so that when we pass the legislation, the industry can’t say we’re picking on them.”
She said she also believes that having so many of those types of businesses hurts those neighborhoods financially.
“When you see an oversaturation of liquor stores, corner stores and tobacco stores, it is harder to develop that community, to get restaurants and entertainment and higher value industries to come in,” she said. “When you talk about bringing grocery stores and you have a saturation of corner stores, they’ll say all of these corner stores count as mini-markets, and so they’ll use that data to say, ‘We don’t feel like we could make a profit to bring a grocery store here.’”