Future Residential Growth
in
East Cocalico Township
One of the main themes I have been discussing for several years is the future growth of the Township's population and the negative impacts this will have on us. Currently the Township has slightly under 10,000 residents in around 3,500 households. There are now approximately 1,200 proposed residential lots in subdivision plans in review within the Township (some are sketch plans, some are preliminary plans, and some have final approval). At the same number of residents per household, this would represent approximately a 35% increase in the Township's population.
The main hold up for this development is the water supply. Construction can't start until the capacity of the water supply is increased. An expansion of the water system is planned. Two new very high capacity wells have been drilled and permitted (each issued a permit for withdrawal of over a million gallons per day). The construction of the new system is just waiting for the developers to purchase enough EDU's (Equivalent Dwelling Units - the amount of water a single family home uses per day) to fund the launch of the project. The Authority needs to sell 800 EDU's to launch the project, and at last report has 548 of the 800 EDU's sold. It is unknown when the remainder of the 800 EDU's will be purchased so the project can launch.
In previous campaigns I had presented many calculations and documents on my web site showing the details of this growth potential. However, at a recent East Cocalico Township Board of Supervisors workshop meeting (September 17, 2009), the Board heard a presentation by HRG, (Herbert, Rowland & Grubic, Inc., the Township's own transportation engineering firm), concerning a proposal to adopt a "traffic impact fee." During this presentation two of the speakers gave comments that are an excellent summary of what I have been saying about the future growth potential in the Township, and its impact on the current residents. Here are two "sound bites" from my recording of that meeting:
Comments on Growth from Scott Russell
"As you are aware (on a) with your water moratorium that you have right now you have a bunch of sketch plans that are on hold right now. They're officially not formal plans if they are submitted as preliminary. Right now you have a little bit of a pause given the way the economy is. But when the economy picks up and the water lifts, I really think that this is THE growth township in the county. How can you manage it in an effective way? And I think that the one down side of the type of growth you are going to experience is going to be very heavy on the residential and very light on the commercial and industrial. Given your proximity to the turnpike, given the fact that you have the City of Lancaster a half hour that way, City of Reading less than a half an hour to the north, Harrisburg forty minutes to the west, and downtown Philadelphia an hour and a half to the east, you have a true bed and breakfast kind of feel to the Township, and when you have all resident moving in with no commercial and other types of development you get 80 cents on the dollar for every dollar of services that goes out, [Douglas Mackley: "Right"] and you really start straining the system and then you start getting into a negative spiral increasing property taxes and reducing services at the same time which is very unpopular."
"You know, like you said before, we have a lot of the things that are gong for us to adopt something like this here. You know, the rule of thumb is that a municipality with surrounding rural characteristic that is really looking for... is going to experience rapid growth or experiences growth in the future or anticipates growth, especially in particular areas. Here we had water supply issue, that's likely to be resolved in 12-18 months, hopefully. That's going to be a big attractor. The other big attractor is Route 222 is dominant to the north of us. That's going to be a big issue. Now, to commute north is not going to be so hard to get into Reading, and you know it's going to open up this area and is going to make us more attractive. You also have great access by the Turnpike here and you have, you know, 222 bisecting everything it's kind of a crossroads here, and you know, Scott said before you are equidistant to Lancaster, Reading, Harrisburg is not that far away, you know Baltimore and York are all right here. They're all within commutable distances."
© Ken McCrea 2009