SANATOGA PA – A developer’s need to alter its grading permit for the now 17-foot-tall earthen mound on the north side of East High Street, just west of Rupert Road and the Turkey Hill convenience store, gave the Lower Pottsgrove (PA) Township Planning Commission a chance Monday (May 17, 2010) to do something it couldn’t before: exercise more control over what’s happening on the site.

Tornetta Realty Corp., which owns the lot at 3049 E. High St., Pottstown PA, that it hopes to develop commercially – and which has been the subject of months-long controversy over dirt and other earthen fill being stockpiled there – won unanimous approval from planners for changes to the grading permit they first issued in spring 2009.

Amendments are necessary so Tornetta can begin uniformly raising the property’s west end to street level, using fill dumped there over more than a year. The new permissions come with strings attached, however.

Pipeline marker.

Commissioners, during their monthly meeting at the municipal building:

• Accepted Tornetta’s plans to re-grade only the west end of the parcel, roughly between the east end of Shaner’s Mobile Home Park and the west side of a newly cleared and marked right-of-way that designates where a Sunoco Corp. gas pipeline is buried. Tornetta’s inability so far to come to terms with Sunoco on covering the right-of-way created its need for the permit changes, planners were told.

• Ordered Tornetta to act more quickly in reducing the height of the fill mound. Township law allows it to be as much as 31 feet tall, engineering representative Chad Camburn reported, and at one time it reached a height of 27 feet, according to township Manager Rodney Hawthorne. Because of compaction and some re-distribution, it now stands at 17 feet. By July, under commission requirements, it must be cut to no more than 10 feet.

• Said the reduced mound must be grass-seeded and stabilized to prevent more surface water runoff and enhance its appearance until the remaining fill can be distributed.

• Required fill on the west side of the parcel to be distributed in five days. The fill stockpile will be reduced in part by shifting its contents to below-street-level portions of the lot. Rather than have a newer, second mound accumulate there, planners said it had to be dispersed within less than a week.

• Said it would not allow dirt to be stockpiled on any other part of the property, nor would it allow fill to be stored there for use on properties elsewhere.

Township law currently does not include time limits on grading permits, board Chairman Geoffrey Dailey noted, “and maybe that’s something that must be addressed by (Lower Pottsgrove) commissioners,” he added.

“It’s a good thing the developer had to come back to the township to change the permit,” Camburn, of Bursich Associates, the township engineering firm, observed. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t have had any leverage to seek these requirements.”

Tornetta’s latest solution to the grading problem is preferred over an earlier suggestion to fill on either side of the right-of-way, leaving a south-to-north gap the length of the property at its center. That would have funneled storm water toward residents at the property’s north end, creating more difficulties, according to Camburn.

Related:

• Grading Permit Change Comes With Limits
• Grading Plan May Leave Gap In Sanatoga Land
• Talks Delay Take-Down Of Sanatoga Mound
• Huge Fill Mound On East High To Come Down
• Earthen Mound Could Grow Higher
• Still Piling It Up At The Interchange
• Sanatoga Soil Mound Concerns Its Neighbors
• Grading Gets Started Near Interchange
• Fill Piles At Sanatoga Exit

Related (to the Lower Pottsgrove Planning Commission meeting of May 17):

• Grading Permit Change Comes With Limits
• Board OKs Ringing Rocks’ Preliminary Plans

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