A possible site for the new North Penn School District transportation center has raised plenty of questions and a public hearing when residents could start to get answers.
In his report to township supervisors Monday night, planning and zoning officer Van Rieker said the district is slated to appear before the township zoning hearing board on April 24 to request a special exception for a transportation center at 203 Church Road.
“My understanding is they intend to move this activity from the high school, to this property at 203 Church Road. It’s a site of over 12 acres, it’s currently vacant,” he said.
“They would propose to lease the property and utilize it on a long-term basis, for a bus garage and the maintenance garage that goes with the servicing of those buses,” Rieker said.
Since early 2023 district administrators and school board members held a series of public presentations outlining the need for renovations to North Penn High School, discussing 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 residents voted down the borrowing necessary for the ninth grade addition, and district officials have since shown revised renderings for the renovations of the current school. The district has secured a zoning change for the high school complex and voted ahead RFPs for several subcontracts needed to finalize the plans.
Throughout 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 100 district-owned buses — 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.
In late February, administrators said they were in talks with a real estate broker about one particular site, and in early March, Rieker told Upper Gwynedd’s board that the district was interested in 203 Church Road, located just south of Wissahickon Avenue, a former warehouse and office site formerly owned by aircraft component manufacturer Triumph Controls which is still located next door at 205 Church.
The district did not directly address the transportation site during their full board and facilities and operations committee meetings in late March, but heard questions about the site during the public comments portion of their March 21 meeting.
Local impact?
Pat Pino of North Wales asked the school board why the transportation facilities needed to be relocated off of the high school campus, how many buses would be kept and repaired on Church Road, and if other options had been studied.
“Rather than relocating to one location, does it make more sense to store the buses at multiple satellite locations, where distribution, and student pickup, and drop-off, and fuel consumption would be less impactful on any one municipality?” Pino asked.
“Has the school district does any preliminary traffic studies on the impact that relocating to the proposed Upper Gwynedd Township location will have, on AM and PM peak hour traffic in Upper Gwynedd?” she said.
She asked if the district was aware of “the enormous amount of money,” over $20 million spent by Upper Gwynedd and Merck on intersection improvements to several streets, including Church Road and Sumneytown Pike, as part of a series of major infrastructure improvement projects in the 1990s-through-2000s, and if the district knew of the impact on SEPTA stations near the proposed site.
“These studies and projects were built with the future in mind, but never did that future include a 100-bus depot. Has the North Penn School District engaged a competent traffic engineer to evaluate the impact that this proposal will have, on the roadway corridor, the township, the region, and Merck?” she said .
District staff did not address the bus move directly, but Superintendent Todd Bauer said details of the high school campus configuration and moving transportation offsite would be shared in the board’s March 25 facilities and operations committee meeting, where new layouts for the renovated high school were presented. District CFO Steve Skrocki added that the district’s fleet currently totals 122 full-size buses, 40 minivans and 21 vans, and Bauer said the district was still awaiting an updated traffic study.
“Yes, a traffic study was done. We are waiting for a copy of that traffic study, and when we have it we will certainly share that,” Bauer said.
More questions
Upper Gwynedd residents added similar questions on Monday night. Resident Carl Smith referenced the “very successful private-public partnership” between Merck and the township to widen Sumneytown, which he called “a congested nightmare” prior to the upgrades, and Church Road and a nearby railroad bridge to handle increasing traffic.
“If that (bus depot) is what you’re going to consider as a board, I would hope that you would make the school district go through the same due diligence that the other commissioner boards made Merck go through,” Smith said. “They paid for engineering, they paid for road studies, and they paid for road reconstruction. That’s the only way it’s going to not have a reality where we take a giant step backwards.”
In talks with township staff, the district has been advised that they’ll have to demonstrate several criteria, including the impact on traffic and on nearby intersections, Rieker told the board.
“They, I expect, will be well-prepared to talk about that. We’ll see — I haven’t seen anything about that in detail,” he said.
Commissioner Greg Moll said he’d been following the high school project talks and saw the district “somewhat scrambling following the results of the referendum,” then asked if the township knew how long the district would use the site.
“If, ten years from now, they say ‘We don’t want to be in this business anymore,’ are we unwinding it?” Moll said.
Rieker answered that he hadn’t seen or heard specifics, only “a very long-term lease,” and said the township had “been advised that it’s not the school district’s intent to purchase that property.”
“I only know what they have advised so far: it would be a long-term lease. You need to be a lessee or an owner to have standing: they’ve filled in that they’re a lessee, that gives them standing, to make application for the special exception. That’s all I know,” Rieker said.
He then outlined the different types of special exceptions the zoning board typically hears, before resident Fred Hencken asked if the use approval was difficult for the district to secure.
“All I can say is that the ordinance provides that applicants have this right to come in, but they need to put on testimony: they need to be clear about it, they need to talk about how big it’s going to be, how it’s going to run, what days there will be activity, what days there won’t be activity,” Rieker said.
“The witnesses that are going to be brought in, I would imagine will be able to speak to these various kinds of details: when, how, and what the impacts might be on sewer, on water, on the roadways. That’s the time to ask those kind of questions,” he said.
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