Hillcrest plans moving ahead
Green space, drive aisles being considered for shopping center as revisions are underway
Plans are moving ahead for two new freestanding buildings at the Hillcrest Shopping Center on East Main Street.
Engineer Jason Smeland gave an update to Lansdale’s planning commission last week about the approvals he and developer Trefoil Properties have gotten so far, and the questions they’re coming up against during the approval process.
“We wanted to come to you and talk about some of the issues we’ll be facing, and explain why we’re doing some things, and why we’re not doing some things you think we should do,” Smeland said.
Last fall, Smeland and a team from Trefoil presented preliminary plans to add two new buildings, each of roughly 3,000 square feet, on pad sites within what is currently parking lots facing the Main Street side of their shopping center. The current shopping center is roughly 135,000 square feet with approximately 580 parking spaces, and the new pad site buildings would bring an increase in green space that the developer has said they hope creates interest in the rest of the center.
“We’re pretty significantly adding some green area, particularly in the front,” Smeland said.
The latest concept plan, which he showed to the planning commission Feb. 13, included new green space created around both buildings, one on the eastern side of the current parking lots
near a large hardware store, and the other on the opposite side near a hill sloping up to the nearby North Penn YMCA.
In the current plans, Smeland said, the two buildings would be surrounded by islands of green space in order to meet stormwater runoff requirements, and a separate island of green space would be created at the center of the parking lot, to the right of the main driveway for those entering the center. The early
concept would have the center green space separated by two lanes of parking aisles from the green space around the westernmost building, Smeland said — but that’s the question he asked the commission to discuss.
“As the site progresses, gets better, and more people
come here, we don’t ever want to be short on parking. We’re really concerned that once we take parking away, we’ll never get it back,” he said.
State permit requirements limit the amount of total disturbance that can be done under the project, Smeland said — hence, his
question to the commission. Member Kevin Dunigan suggested green space of some sort be added at the end of the parking aisles on the YMCA side of the property, and commission Chairman Sam Carlo asked if small green islands could be created at the end of those aisles.
“If you could create a green buffer along the front, we’d prefer that,” Carlo said.
Smeland said the two parking aisles are roughly 170 feet apart, but any disturbance to the pavement between the two proposed green islands would count as disturbed soil toward the
permit requirement.
“Maybe we can’t get a whole swath in there, but maybe 2-foot-by-10-foot-wide islands. At least it would break it up,” Smeland said.
Current plans show more green space being created at the rear of the shopping center, near where the shopping center exits onto Oakland Avenue, and Smeland
said details of an update to that side of the center are still being worked out.
“We know you have concerns about what the back of the building is going to look like. I don’t have answers tonight, but we’re looking into that,” he said.
As of the Feb. 13 meeting, tenants of the two freestanding buildings had not been identified, so Smeland said a final plan could wait until those arrangements are made, depending on whether those tenants
would have any input on the orientation of which way the new buildings would face.
“We may end up coming back to you after the fact, when we actually have a user, and say, ‘They wanted to shift the orientation of the building.’ But the concept is going to stay the same,” he said.
Commission members also suggested Smeland revisit the configuration of the entrance lanes that take traffic from Main Street into the center’s parking lots, and to consider where to leave enough space for snow to be plowed and left to melt during winters. Smeland said that feedback would be taken into consideration in a future update, which would be presented to the commission in “a month or two.”