BUS DEPOT SITE?
Upper Gwynedd property could be under review for new school district transportation center
Area residents may have gotten a hint at where the North Penn School District is looking to relocate the district’s transportation center.
Township officials gave the first public address of a possible site the district is eyeing on Monday night, naming a site on Church Road in Upper Gwynedd as a possibility.
“203 Church Road, the old Triumph site: the prior submission has been put on hold, and the North Penn School District has requested our consideration of a revised plan, for the bus garage, on that site,” said planning and zoning officer Van Rieker.
“It’s still in its concept phase; that could become a real plan in the next couple weeks,” he said.
Since early 2023 district administrators and school board members held a series of public presentations outlining the needs for renovations to North Penn High School, presenting two major concepts, one with additions that would move roughly 1,000 ninth grade students to the high school, and the second featuring largely utility upgrades and modernization of the current school footprint.
On Jan. 16 voters vetoed the borrowing necessary for the ninth grade addition, and district officials have since said they’re working on revising the plans for the renovations of the current school without the addition, and in late February secured a zoning change for the high school complex and voted ahead RFPs for several subcontracts needed to finalize the plans.
During those talks, district administrators said that the current district transportation center — a bus maintenance garage, dispatch office, propane tank and fuel station, and parking for roughly 100 district-owned school buses — that’s currently located between the high school and Crawford Stadium would need to be moved offsite, to free up that space for modular classrooms and construction staging.
District officials have said moving the transportation center offsite should cut down on traffic into and out of the high school, as bus drivers would not need to park their personal vehicles at the high school while driving buses back and forth, and have said an offsite location could help the district bid out a contract for a private firm to handle certain bus runs.
As recently as last week, administrators
said they were in talks with a real estate broker about one particular site that could become a new location for the district’s transportation center, and that actions could happen quickly within the next few weeks.
Enter Upper Gwynedd
In early February Rieker reported to that township’s commissioners that the owners of 203 Church Road, located just south of Wissahickon Avenue, were seeking relief from the township zoning hearing board for a land development plan that was in early talks with township staff.
“We are advised that the plan may be withdrawn, and a new plan issued in its stead. It’s the old Triumph building on Church Road — for those that drive over there, you’ll see a lot of dirt and excavation on the site, for about two months now,” he said. “It’s a remediation project that’s going on, on that site. That’s the property that will be the subject of the warehouse plan, or perhaps a new plan, we’ll have to wait and see on that one.”
Montgomery County property records indicate the owner of 203 Church Road in Upper Gwynedd as an “Alpha Strata LLC”, with a listed mailing address in Line
Lexington, which acquired the 13.7-acre property or $1.85 million in March 2021 from Triumph Controls Inc, with the prior listed sale being from the Montgomery County Industrial Development Authority to Triumph Controls for $2 million in 2002.
The property has an assessed value of $1.15 million and is listed as being zoned I-Industrial, with a one-story warehouse building onsite, and the county records indicate the site contains roughly 27,500 square feet of manufacturing and 5,040 square feet of office space in a building built in 1967, and a note that “environmental remediation — soil removal involving earth disturbance” began in December 2023.
Triumph Controls is a subsidiary of The Triumph Group, a Radnor-based firm that offers design, production and service for aircraft systems and components, and the company’s website lists 205 Church Road as the site of a 75,000-square-foot facility offering design, development, manufacturing, and repairs of cable controls, cockpit controls, latches, valves, rods and other parts for Boeing, Rolls Royce, Learjet, and other aircraft manufacturers and types.
According to MediaNews Group archives, Triumph shifted personnel from Upper Gwynedd to a new assembly facility in Alabama in 2003, after a similar move of personnel from Upper Gwynedd to a
Triumph facility in Indiana the year before.
On Monday night Rieker gave another update, saying the owner of the former Triumph site at 203 Church had put a prior plan on hold, and that the township commissioners could see details of a new district plan in the coming weeks. During public comments, resident William Jackson of
the local “Bike North Penn” advocacy group said he feels “the residents of Upper Gwynedd deserve a completely connected sidewalk on Church Road,” among concerns about bike lanes and accessibility throughout the township.
“The location that may be under consideration for the new bus garage, for North Penn: I would suggest that
any approval of that, or anything else that goes into that site, that sidewalks be included in the approval,” he said. “I’ll be back, as much as I can, until I get a connected stretch of sidewalk on that stretch of road.”
Rieker answered the comment by noting that the township has recently asked for sidewalks as part of any new plan: “As best we
can, the planning commission and staff are grabbing new properties, when they come in (for approvals), and requesting that sidewalks be installed.”
“For Church Road, we have two that you haven’t seen, that are in play: 212, which is storage, that will have a sidewalk when the new building is completed, maybe in six to eight
months, and 203, which may come back for the bus garage, will have a sidewalk frontage as well. We’re trying to gain on it, a bite at a time,” he said.
Upper Gwynedd’s commissioners next meet at 7 p.m. on March 11 at the township administration building, 1 Parkside Place. For more information visit www.UpperGwynedd.org.