The Baltimore County Council has advanced a measure that would require a supermajority to build in designated rural areas of the county, capping off nearly a month of debate that was mostly not about preserving land.

The 5-2 vote Monday night will put the proposal before voters in 2026, when they will decide whether to adapt it as a change to the county charter.

Councilmen Pat Young and Julian Jones, both Democrats, voted against the change.

The vote comes as the county is grappling with a housing crunch, though planning experts have cast doubt on whether further development in the rural area would alleviate that. The rural area is on well and septic systems, is not zoned for multifamily housing or townhouses, and has no mass transit.

Because the future council will include nine members due to a recent charter change, six would have to vote to breach what is known as the Urban-Rural Demarcation Line, or URDL, if voters approve the amendment.

The urban-rural line divides the county into a zone where development is restricted and another where it is encouraged. Two-thirds of the county lies in the rural zone, where only about 10% of the population resides. The remainder of the county’s residents live in the one-third of the land below the line, which includes Timonium, Towson, Catonsville and Parkville, as well as the areas along the light rail line.

The county created the URDL (pronounced UR-dull) in 1967, when development pressure was gobbling up farms and forests. County planners worried about sediment and runoff entering the critical water supply for the Baltimore metropolitan area. The line protects the Gunpowder River and county reservoirs, including Loch Raven and Prettyboy.

Its zoning allows for houses on the largest of lots; many small family farms, state-preserved forests, and streams cover the landscape. The URDL is the reason that drivers see little but greenery from Hunt Valley to the Pennsylvania line. Much of that land can’t be developed unless county planners shift the line and extend sewer capacity.

“It is about our water supply,” said Council Chair Mike Ertel, a Towson Democrat. “We have to protect the water supply.”

The original legislation, which Councilman David Marks sponsored, would also have allowed the councilman in whose district a URDL change was proposed to veto it. But Councilman Izzy Patoka introduced an amendment to strip that provision from the bill, and it passed. Ertel said the supermajority requirement would provide enough protection. The goal, he said, was always “to make it just a little bit harder” to cross the line.

Councilman Wade Kach, though, was furious that the proposed veto power was removed. Much of the rural land that developers covet is in his district, and Kach said he is constantly turning down their requests to build there because his constituents have asked him to protect it.

“I am pretty disgusted with how you took out the councilmanic courtesy,” the north county Republican said. “It is just plain wrong for the will of my constituents to be bypassed.”

Nevertheless, Kach eventually voted for the proposed URDL protections because, he said, “there are more advantages to having this as the law than not.”

Debate over the URDL bill spanned several hours over three sessions, but much of it was not about protecting rural land. Dozens of residents testified in favor of the legislation, ranging from farmers to environmentalists, planners and community association leaders. Many of them live on the urban side of the line and worry that further incursions into the rural side will exacerbate divestment of older Beltway communities in need of reinvestment, such as Essex.

Instead, hand-wringing over the bill hinged on codifying processes into legislation. Councilman Jones, who lives on rural land in Woodstock, consistently fretted that the legislation was a solution in search of a problem, and that his colleagues should “let sleeping dogs lie.” If the URDL was working well and wasn’t under threat, he reasoned, why call attention to it and possibly invite more development pressure?

Young, a Catonsville Democrat running for county executive next year, was among those who opposed giving one council member veto power over changes in their district. Baltimore County is the only local government where a council member largely controls projects in his or her district and others rarely object. The council has practiced this deference for decades, but it is custom, not law, and Young did not want the bill to codify that.

That councilmanic courtesy provision also concerned Nick Stewart, a former county school board member who is is mulling a run for county executive in 2026. He urged council members to remove the deference clause from the bill.

“We have a disease in Baltimore County, and it’s called councilmanic courtesy, and it’s killing us,” Stewart said after waiting five hours to testify. “We are one county. We should be acting like it. What you are doing here is entrenching minority rule.”

Stewart said he would not object to the bill if the councilmen removed the clause.

The only other person to testify against the bill was Sharonda Huffman, who is running for the council in 2026. She said the professional planners should study the URDL in light of the housing shortage in the county.

After spending more than an hour discussing amendments, procedure and decorum, Ertel was weary of the sniping and the side discussions that had nothing to do with protecting water, forests and farms. It was almost 8 p.m., and there were other items on the agenda.

“Let’s move on, for God’s sake,” he said.