An ongoing hearing about zoning requests for a warehouse facility in the “Cross Keys” area near the intersection of Rt. 30 and Rt. 94 reconvened Monday, October 28 for four more hours of testimony.
With more witnesses yet to testify, the hearing will resume Thursday, November 7 at 6:00 p.m. in the meeting room of the United 33 Hook and Ladder building, 21 N. Bolton St. New Oxford, PA.
The objectors, a group of people who claim they will be adversely affected by the development, and who have hired an attorney to represent them in the proceedings, are expected to call a traffic engineer to testify next.
The applicant, NOBPA, LLC, brought an amended site plan and traffic study to Monday’s session of the hearing. These were updated when one of the parcels of land included in the previous site plan was removed.
At a previous session, questions were raised about whether the applicant’s purchase agreement for this parcel, referred to as the Myers Property, was still valid. That parcel has now been removed from the site plan.
The removed Myers property was on the west side of Rt. 94. The amended sketch plan presented to the ZHB now includes one 621,000 square foot warehouse and two commercial restaurant buildings on the east side of Rt. 94. A second warehouse proposed for the Myers property lot was removed from the sketch plan.
The Zoning Hearing Board (ZHB) for Hamilton Township is tasked with evaluating a request for a special exception, which would allow for warehouse land use within the commercial zone, and a variance related to how far buildings must be set back from property lines.
The need for a “special exception” means that a certain type of land use —– in this case, a warehouse in the commercial zone —- can only be permitted if applicants apply on a case-by-case basis before the township’s ZHB. The PA Department of Community & Economic Development states that a ZHB must evaluate whether the special exception land use “is consistent with the public interest as expressed in specific standards and criteria established in the zoning ordinance.”
Concerns about increased traffic are a main topic of the hearings regarding the proposed warehouse project, about two miles west of New Oxford.
The amended traffic study presented Monday by the applicants showed lower traffic volumes, due to the decreased scale of the project.
Because NOBPA, LLC plans to develop the project then sell it before construction or operation on the site, the end user of the warehouse is unknown.
The traffic engineer who prepared the applicant’s traffic study testified that the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation released new guidance this year for estimating the number of trips generated by a warehouse when the end user is not yet known. He testified that the amended traffic study was prepared using those standards.
Attorney Nathan Wolf, who represents the objectors, questioned, as in a previous session of the hearing, whether the traffic study was accurately representing the potential traffic that could be generated. He said the traffic generated might be as much as 4,000 trips per day if the eventual use of the warehouse was an operation like a package hub or a fulfillment center, for example, Amazon, FedEx, or USPS.
“Isn’t it easier, based upon the fact that [the applicant has] traffic counts for the area, they have square footage [of the warehouse], they have a site plan — Isn’t it easier for the Township to require now the worst-case scenario be provided as part of the traffic impact study to assess the full impact that could occur?” he asked.
The applicant’s engineer said it was now standard practice to conduct a study after a warehouse project is built to determine the actual volume of traffic generated by the site.
The township could place conditions on approval of the project, requiring the warehouse’s owners to contribute road improvements, such as additional lanes leading to the Cross Keys intersection, if the actual traffic volume exceeds what was predicted.
A very high-traffic site might require improvements like building multiple extra lanes on the highway to handle volume. It would be difficult to secure the right-of-ways required to build these lanes, making them logistically infeasible and/or expensive. If the road improvements couldn’t be completed, the warehouse operator would then be in violation of their occupancy permit unless they changed operations to reduce traffic volume.
The attorney representing NOBPA, David Tshudy, suggested that these conditions would make any parties interested in the site “very hesitant” to do anything that would put them on the hook for road infrastructure improvements. He felt the site would be unlikely, therefore, to attract business that would generate significantly more traffic than predicted in the traffic study.
As in previous sessions of the hearing, a crowd of attendees filled the room at the beginning of the proceedings. Although there was not time for public comment before the hearing recessed at 10:00 p.m., banners on the walls expressed opposition to the development with slogans like “Go Away NOBPA, LLC” and “No Mega-Warehousing in Hamilton Township.”
Approximately one hour into the hearing, there was a disruption from an audience member yelling “Vote no, vote no!” as the applicant’s attorney discussed the site plan. The interruptions stopped after John Baranski, the attorney who presides over Hamilton Township’s ZHB hearings, said they would have to recess if they couldn’t get through testimony.
A video recording of the hearing was created by the Community Media Center of South Central PA.
Catalina Righter, freelance reporter, lives in New Oxford. She previously wrote for the Carroll County Times and the Kent County News, covering crime, education, local government and arts. She works as a legal assistant.
Vote NO! This is already a busy intersection and there is NO ROOM for the expansion that would be needed. Doing a study after it is built is ludicrous when we know going in that it can’t work.
This location is not next to 15, 81, or 83. A warehouse with so much traffic should be adjacent to a highway with minimal traffic on local roads.
Vote NO!