When Margaret Kling closed the doors to her Dover Montessori Country Day Academy in May, she had plans.
 
   She found a temporary location, Calvary Church of the Nazarene in Dover, where she could house her school beginning in September while a new one is built in Magnolia.
 
   But two weeks before her plans for the move were scheduled to come before Kent County’s Regional Planning Commission, she learned that North Little Creek Road church is located in the Dover Air Force Base’s crash zone — an area where the Air Force believes a plane could go down, an area where schools aren’t permitted.
  
  “I have no place to go now,” Kling said at the commission’s July 3 public hearing, who also noted that she left her previous location in Dover Air Park because of exorbitant rent increases. “Everything was a fit until this.”
 
   Kling’s engineer, Matthew Metzler of Charles D. Murphy Associates, said the discrepancy is that the county’s description of the crash zone is different from the Air Force’s.
  
  Dover Air Force Base officials sent a letter to the county opposing the location of the school based on their crash zone maps.
  
  And Commissioner Paul Davis said if the Air Force does not rescind their letter of objection, he won’t vote in favor of it — “period.”
 
   “If you don’t resolve this issue, I will ask for this application to be tabled,” Davis said. “It’s a bad situation. I don’t want that on my conscience.”
 
   Kling intends to use the church as a temporary location for approximately one year; however, under Kent County code, when a conditional use is placed on a property, it remains with a property forever, not the person to which the use is granted
 
   While Commissioner Clifton Coleman Jr. noted that filing in May for the conditional use application to get the school up and running in September is “asking a lot,” he said he understood the position Kling is in. He suggested getting the Air Force, county staff and the applicant together to figure it out. 
 
   Commissioner Gene Thornton noted that the crash zone plans could have changed since Dover AFB is now flying C-17s in addition to the formerly exclusive C-5s.
  
   “Every time they have a plane crash, they change how they do business,” Thornton said. “The Air Force [officials] are the experts on when and where their planes would crash, not the county.”

In other business ...
 
   • Commissioners heard testimony for a proposed car wash on the west side of Route 13, south of Simms Wood Road. Project engineer Bob Johnson said it would be a two-bay automatic car wash, similar to the one on Route 13 in Camden.
 
   • An application for a 400,000-gallon, 175-foot water tower for Tidewater Utilities was presented by Dover attorney Mark Dunkle. The water tower and treatment facility would service Carpenters Bridge Crossing and other area subdivisions to be constructed southwest of Frederica. Dunkle said the elevated tower is a “regional approach” to servicing the area with water.
 
   The Regional Planning Commission will make its recommendations on the applications at 7 p.m. Thursday, July 10, in Levy Court Chambers, Kent County Administrative Complex, 555 Bay Road, Dover.

Email Maureen Raitz at maureenraitz@doverpost.com