A mailbox reads “203” in front of a vacant former office building at 203 Church Road in Upper Gwynedd on Tuesday, April 9 2024.
The North Penn School District may be back to the drawing board in finding a site for the district’s transportation center.
School board members heard an update Monday night on several aspects of planned renovations to North Penn High School, including a shift away from a possible site on Church Road in Upper Gwynedd for a relocated bus depot.
“At this point right now, the one transportation building that we have spoken about numerous times in the past few months, the property of interest that we had mentioned, has not turned out to be a feasible property,” said Tom Schneider, district director of facilities and operations.
A property at 203 Church Road in Upper Gwynedd has been discussed publicly, but not by the district, as North Penn’s officials have sought a new site for the district’s transportation needs. Throughout 2023 district officials made the case for renovations to North Penn High School, and said that current district transportation center — a bus maintenance garage, dispatch office, propane tank and fuel station, and parking for roughly 120 district-owned buses — located between the high school and Crawford Stadium would need to be moved offsite, to use that space for modular classrooms or a new wing, 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, Upper Gwynedd’s board heard that the district was interested in 203 Church Road, a former warehouse and office site formerly owned by aircraft component manufacturer Triumph Controls which is located next door at 205 Church.
In late March the district and township both heard questions from residents asking if the traffic and road impact of the site had been studied, and who would pay for any needed road upgrades to handle the increased traffic, while the township said the district would need permission from Upper Gwynedd’s zoning hearing board to allow the transportation center use on that site. Just before that hearing, Upper Gwynedd announced that the North Penn item had been postponed until May.
During the board’s facilities and operations committee meeting on May 6, Schneider gave updates on several parts of the high school project, and did not reference a specific address but said that the transportation site previously discussed was no longer feasible.
“The broker then, within a couple of days, found another building which could be a potential transportation building, and that is located in Montgomery Township. So we are looking at that right now, to see the viability of that new building being the transportation facility,” Schneider said.
Meeting materials for Montgomery Township’s supervisors indicate no discussions in April on any North Penn use request or application, and the only zoning board case scheduled for discussion in May regarded a request from the Montgomery Mall to allow “bartender-dispensed, client-supplied alcoholic beverages” at a mall venue.
Just minutes after the school board committee meeting, Upper Gwynedd’s commissioners heard a brief update on the site too: planning and zoning officer Van Rieker told that board that North Penn’s pending zoning application for 203 Church Road had been withdrawn from the April zoning hearing board meeting “at the request of the applicant,” and could be heard when that board next meets on May 28.
Back on the high school site, Schneider reported that since the last facilities committee meeting in late March, staff have received bids back on three contracts meant to document existing conditions on the site, including stormwater infiltration, the interior of the building via 3-D scanning and modeling, and underground utility locations. Staff have vetted the responses and recommended firms for each, Schneider told the committee, and that group voted ahead those recommendations for full board approval later this month.
Talks on the high school renovation design remain ongoing between administrators and the district’s architect and project construction manager, Schneider told the committee, and an updated design and/or construction timeline is possible when the facilities and operations committee next meets on May 28.
“We anticipate having something at that meeting,” he said.
North Penn’s school board next meets at 7 p.m. on May 16 and the facilities and operations committee next meets at 7 p.m. on May 28; for more information visit www.NPenn.org.
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