The Times Herald (Norristown, PA)
Assisted care home for seniors concerns residents
LIMERICK >> A hearing for a proposal to build a twostory, 30,000-square-foot assisted living senior facility on 8.5 acres at 545 Lewis Road was continued until next month.
The site is located behind the Wawa at the intersection with Linfield Road and construction there is of particular interest to those who live along and adjacent to Aronomink Drive judging by the number of people who questioned the project during a Tuesday hearing.
The project has already obtained four variances from the township’s zoning hearing board, including an allowance to clear more vegetation that the ordinance allows, and to have less parking than the ordinance requires.
The zoning allows the senior housing use but requires the developers to obtain a conditional use approval from the supervisors, which allows the supervisors to impose conditions on the approval.
If the conditional use is approved, the project must still go through the land development process before the township planning commission before coming back to the supervisors for final approval.
The conditional use hearing was continued until next month due to several unanswered questions the supervisors had regarding traffic and work now being done on the site.
Residents’ concerns focused largely on the impact the project would have on traffic and stormwater runoff.
Resident Andrea Straka said during heavy rainfalls she can see the water running down toward her Cherokee Circle home and neighbors have had flooding problems in basements and yards, “turning them into swamps and making
An artist’s rendering of what the proposed assisted living senior facility in Limerick would look like.
them unusable.”
John Alejnikov, an engineer for the developer, said the underground stormwater management system planned for the project will mean when construction is complete, there will be less runoff from the site than there is now.
Jerrid Dinnen, with Atlantic Traffic and Design, said traffic studies show
the facility would add only 21 new trips to the morning peak traffic period and 29 to the evening peak.
Ben Wells, president of business development for Kaplan Development, LLC, which owns Senior Housing Development LLC, said at the other similar facilities his company operates, there are three shifts — 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.; 3 to 10 p.m. and 10 p.m. to 7 a.m.
The facility would create 150 to 200 construction jobs and, once built, require 75 to 80 permanent staff “to run the operation,” wells said.
Supervisors seemed to agree with the developers contention that other potential uses the zoning allows at the site — a bar, a drive-through restaurant or kennel — would generate more noise, traffic and light pollution than an assisted care facility.
“A full service hotel could be built there, that’s a 24hour operation,” said Supervisor’s Vice Chairman Michael McCloskey Jr., adding “you have to ask yourself which is the lesser of two evils.”
But resident Matt Lewis told them that restrictive covenants put on the property when the Wawa was built preclude many of those uses making the comparison moot.
This article first appeared as a post in The Digital Notebook blog.