OPEN SPACE DEBATE
Residents again demand not to build on farm
Township commissioners again heard from a standingroom-only crowd at Tuesday night’s meeting, all of them urging that the township not move forward with plans to build a $5.5 million township complex on land purchased to be protected open space.
As occurred at the Jan. 17 meeting, all seats in the meeting room were filled and roughly 20 more people stood in the hall, trying to hear what was happening inside the meeting room.
Nearly every speaker urged against the township’s current plans to use part of the 36-acre Smola Farm at the intersection of Moyer and Evans roads, as the location for a new municipal complex that will house the township police,
highway and administration facilities.
“It’s just so disturbing to see how you guys are treating the people who elected
you,” said Al Leach, who is also the president of the Pottsgrove School Board. “You’re supposed to be doing this together. You wouldn’t
be getting this reaction, with everyone yelling at you if you were just transparent. You’re supposed to be our leaders. You’re supposed to be the best we’ve got.”
Referring to a recently filed lawsuit to stop the project, Michelle Dellasandro admonished the commissioners, “you’re spending taxpayers’ money on legal fees to defend your illegal actions.”
But before any of that occurred, the board conducted a re-organization when it was announced that Cathy Paretti would no longer serve as board vice president. She was replaced, with a unanimous vote, by Hank Llewellyn.
During commissioner comments at the end of Tuesday night’s meeting, Paretti said it is her belief that residents are as upset about the lack of public outreach
about the project as they are about building on land purchased for open space preservation.
“It’s about the process. We screwed up the process. We needed public meetings. We could have avoided all this,” said Paretti. “The public doesn’t have time to keep up with everything we’re doing, and we don’t have a newsletter.”
Commissioners President Trace Slinkerd and Commissioner Don Read argue that the property at the center of the debate is no longer open space because some of the proceeds from the sale of the township sewer system to Pennsylvania American Water in June was spent to pay back the bond used to buy the property. Until then, proceed from a .25 percent earned income tax raise approved by 60 percent of voters in 2006 were being used to make the bond payments.
“This is not open space,” Read said Tuesday night, noting that a farmer rents the land to grow soybeans making it more of a forprofit investment.
Read’s comment echoed those in a statement posted on the township website, clapping back at a letter to the editor published in The Mercury on Feb. 16 from Oliver Bass, president of the land preservation organization Natural Lands, which has preserved more than 125,000 acres in the region.
In the letter, Bass wrote: “The plan is contrary to the purposes of the open space fund that the township used to purchase the property — a fund Upper Pottsgrove residents have supported for the last 16 years through a portion of their earned income tax.”
“The land is not preserved open space, which again is a fact that has been continuously and purposefully misrepresented to the public. It is municipal owned land and the proposal is to use it for a municipal purposes, to stop the current business use of the property, and to make the ground more usable by the public,” the township’s statement read.
Jim Capinski, a professional property appraiser and regular commenter at township meetings, said “I take offense” to the township’s statement. He noted that the property is listed in the township’s official open space plan, adopted in 2020 — the same year planning for the complex began behind closed doors — as “permanently protected open space.”
“If anything is misleading the public, it’s the township
“If the township is willing to break its promise here, it will ruin our credibility with anyone who wants to sell us a piece of property again. Land you purchased with open space funds should be preserved as open space. That’s a no-brainer.”
— Resident Joe McNicholas
in this letter,” Capinski said, adding that commissioners have complained objections are being raised “at the 11th hour. Well, we didn’t find out about this until the 10th hour.”
Resident Liz Bedell criticized the township for going back on its word to the late Thomas Smola, the former property owner who, several witnesses have said, only sold the land to the township with the promise that it would be permanently preserved.
“If land is preserved for a reason, exactly when did that reason change?” Bedell asked.
“If the township is willing to break its promise here, it will ruin our credibility with anyone who wants to sell us a piece of property again,” warned resident Joe McNicholas. “Land you purchased with open space funds should be preserved as open space. That’s a nobrainer.”
He added, “you’re spending money on lawsuits defending the indefensible.”
“Sometimes I wonder, are you listening to what we’re trying to tell you?” asked resident Barbara Corker.
Several speakers suggested the township simply build at the current location of the police and highway departments at Heather Place and State Road, adjacent to Route 100.
But that property is only .8 acres, said Slinkerd, and building there would require “going up,” adding that a multi-floored building would be more expensive to build. He said the current building there, as well as the firehouse on Farmington Avenue, which houses the administrative offices in the basement, “are falling down.”
Last month, Slinkerd told the public the project would use “at the most, 3.5 acres, maybe four, at that corner.” At Tuesday’s meeting, he said the township only needs 1.2 acres.
“We haven’t come up with a final size,” Read said at another point. “But we’ve instructed the engineer to make it as small as possible.”
Read said a 2018 building study done by the commissioners before he was elected showed “it will be substantially cheaper to build new than knock the current buildings down and re-build. This is a 30-year solution and that’s what we’re focusing on.”
He said the Smola site can be improved with trail connections to other township trails. “We can make it better than a soybean field,” Read said.
Slinkerd also rebutted the idea that the people who have protested at the last two meetings represent any kind of majority of the township’s population. “There are about 6,000 people in this township and we represent all of them.”
He further said the majority of voters who approved the open space tax in 2006 were only 800 yes votes to 600 no votes.
Llewellyn said he has spoken with “70 or 80 people” about the project “and only a handful are against it. That said a lot of them didn’t know anything about it. Most of them just told me: ‘whatever you think is best.’ If I don’t see more people against it I’m for moving forward with the plan.”
For Waldt, the protests he’s seen are enough already. “I don’t want to see (the building) there.” Looking at the crowd, Waldt said “you don’t want it there, so I don’t want it there.”