Why the Don Guanella development needs to be scaled down
To the Times:
The would-be developers of Don Guanella, Peter Miller and Brian McElwee, in their Dec. 3 letter to the editor, again promoted the false choice between “a conservation solution,” which would vastly overcharge the township, county, and school district for what is mostly unbuildable land in exchange for a massive shopping center, or “a residential ‘by right’ plan per current zoning.” There are, of course, other choices not mentioned, one of these being that the developer could build a much smaller shopping center. And contrary to the fiction that they have no choice but to build either residential or commercial at Don Guanella is the fact that they have “an option to purchase agreement” with the archdiocese which does not require them to go to settlement. In other words, they can walk away.
Their commercial plan
GUEST COLUMN
calls for a truly monstrous
47-acre shopping center eight acres bigger than the entire
39 acre Springfield Mall complex and immediately adjacent to the large 41-acre Lawrence Park Shopping Center. With 17 different restaurants, a Super Wawa, four-story medical office building, 150 housing units, and about 20 other commercial uses, it’s no wonder that Marple’s commissioners declined to meet privately with the developers to discuss their objections further. The traffic from such an enormous shopping center would cripple an already heavily congested road and forever impair the character of Marple Township and surrounding communities.
The assurances made by the developers’ traffic engineer that the addition of
23,000 new vehicle trips to Sproul Road would be mitigated by a few superficial road and signal modifications failed to allay the commissioners’ fears of traffic gridlock because, as everyone but the developer seems to understand, you can’t add a couple of turn lanes and restripe Sproul Road (to make five total lanes instead of four) and expect 23,000 new vehicle trips to disappear on a road that already gags on 33,000 daily trips. And 23,000 is most certainly on the low end of the range of likely new traffic volume. Carlino’s traffic engineer was hired to deliver a conclusion much like a defense witness is paid to deliver agreeable testimony in support of their employer’s argument.
The developers have not proposed addressing the root cause of traffic backups along Springfield and Sproul: the gridlocked intersections of Springfield Road/Route
1, Sproul Road/Route 1, and the lights along Lawrence Park Shopping Center. Without adding lanes to Springfield Road from the Lamb Tavern to Route 1, making Sproul Road a full six lanes from Route 1 to Lawrence Road, or enlarging the Route
1 intersections, traffic congestion will only get much worse to the detriment of property values and residents’ quality of life.
Marple’s commissioners expressed the same fears. Commissioner Longacre said at September’s public meeting, “I remember when you could get through Newtown Square in 5 minutes (on West Chester Pike) ... I’m terrified at what could happen in (the Marple) area if we don’t take control of whatever is built there.” He noted that all of the development along the Route 3 corridor comes from developments that all had traffic studies done. “But despite all those studies, it now takes a half hour to get through the same area.” Commissioner Rufo was alarmed by the scale of the shopping center saying, “We shouldn’t have to live with a
400,000-square-foot retail center right next to another one.”
Commissioner John Lucas echoed that saying, “you can’t move on Sproul Road now, and I can’t imagine it getting better by adding 47 acres of dense commercial development.” Longacre pointed out that another citizen’s group did their own independent traffic study of a proposed development in the vicinity of
252 and Route 3 and found that the developer’s traffic engineer blatantly misrepresented the actual traffic impact of a proposed development. After the error was exposed, that development was substantially downsized.
The developers’ claim to care about preserving the forest is belied by their threats to cut it down unless they get their huge commercial colony. If they actually care about preservation and the people of Marple, they would either scale down their plans and propose a modest commercial development that’s more appropriately sized for the congested Sproul Road corridor. If the archdiocese’s price for the land is too high for what is most appropriate to build, they could also just walk away. Building a commercial center that’s bigger than Ellis Preserve and the Newtown Square Shopping Center combined (46 acres in total) is simply a nonstarter. storage”—and cautioning that the U.S. “cannot meet winter gas demand without storage.”
Reliable, affordable electricity is what keeps Americans warm and safe. But recent price swings in natural gas—and reduced availability—argue for the continued use of both coal and nuclear power to keep meeting baseload electricity needs. Anything less could mean worrying shortfalls for America’s power grid.