Prince George's Council

Seven hundred acres of prime county land, two departing anchors, and a $90 million budget hole formed the backdrop as Council Chair Krystal Oriadha pushed a three-bill economic development package through an initial full council vote Tuesday, the same afternoon her legislation was introduced.

The urgency behind the bills is rooted in two concrete losses. The Washington Commanders' 200-acre Northwest Stadium site in Landover sits available for redevelopment after the NFL franchise secured a deal to relocate to a renovated RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., expected to open in 2030. The Commanders' lease on the Landover property expires in 2027, and the stadium currently generates approximately $14 million per year for the county. Across the county, CBRE is marketing the 500-acre former Six Flags America site in Bowie after the park closed in November 2025 following 26 years of operation. Six Flags generated roughly $3 million in annual tax revenue, a figure county leaders believe a redeveloped site could far exceed.

The package's first component creates a task force of residents and business interests to investigate why the county's permitting process consistently lags behind neighboring jurisdictions. Prior reform efforts have not taken hold, and slow permitting has drawn persistent complaints from developers for years.

"One of the things we hear all the time is, it's going to take us twice as long to develop a project here than it is in neighboring jurisdictions," Oriadha said.

The second bill gives county-owned small businesses a 5% advantage when bidding on county contracts. The third requires that 20% of all county government construction contracts go to locally-owned and operated businesses, a provision aimed specifically at elevating Minority Business Enterprises from subcontractor to prime contractor status.

"A lot of the complaints have been that our MBEs have the opportunity to be subcontractors, but they rarely have the opportunity to be prime contractors," Oriadha said.

Beyond permitting and contracts, Oriadha pointed to the county's heavy reliance on National Harbor, its largest commercial tax base built around hospitality and restaurants, as a structural vulnerability. "We lose so much revenue to Virginia and to D.C. around restaurants and entertainment," she said. Expanding the county's full-service restaurant base is an explicit goal of the package.

The county adopted a $5.8 billion budget for FY2026 while facing a gap exceeding $90 million, making new commercial tax revenue more than aspirational. Oriadha, elected Council Chair on December 2, 2025, and representing District 7 since 2022, set "prototype for what is possible" as her theme for the 2026 session. She stated that economic development "wasn't a priority for past leadership of the Economic Development Corporation," framing the package as a course correction rather than an incremental update.

The Committee of the Whole recommended all three bills before the full council advanced them the same afternoon. The legislation still requires additional votes before becoming law.