Politics & Government

Steel Site Development Will Head to Council

The planning commission voted 6-1 to recommend approval for an upcoming conditional use hearing.

A mixed-use residential, office and retail plan for Parcel O of the steel site will move on to the next step.

On Thursday evening, Phoenixville’s planning commission voted 6-1, with Dr. David Saneck in opposition, to recommend that borough council approve the conditional use application for the plan.

The plan is for a seven-acre tract on the steel site, which has frontage on both Main Street and the 100 block of Bridge Street. In addition to 275 proposed residential units, the plan also consists of more than 85,000-square feet of retail space, an office building and a standalone parking garage. A new street would run through the parcel and a trail is being proposed along the French Creek.

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During the review of conditions for the site, planner Kyle Guie asked Manny DeMutis, who’s hoping to develop the site with O Creek Associates, if he thought the current market could support retail in downtown Phoenixville. Guie pointed out that there are already vacant storefronts.

DeMutis told the commission he trusted the plan would succeed.

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“We either are pertinent to the marketplace or we die,” DeMutis said. 

He added that the mixed-use model seems to be the way to go.  

“The new model is not separating and segregating office campuses and segregating apartment complexes and segregating strip malls,” DeMutis said. “I’m hoping that’s dead. I think it’s going to be a combination of places.”

DeMutis said that O Creek Associates will retain the retail properties on New and Main streets because the group believes in the plan.

The conditional use hearing has to occur because the original plans from 2006 for the site have been changed. Issues that will be examined in conditional use include the footprint on the site and the density on the site.

A different plan for the site received conditional use approval in 2006, but that plan never came to fruition. The new plan makes several changes, with a key one being the increase in residential density to 275 apartments.

Planning Commission Chairwoman Teena Peters said she wasn’t comfortable with the amount of density, and felt that it could have a negative effect on the area. Despite voicing her objections for the record, she did vote to recommend the conditional use approval with the 29 proposed conditions.

Many conditions discussed were carry overs from the 2006 conditional use for the site. One of the conditions was that an actual plan be submitted to council for the conditional use hearing. DeMutis said he’d comply, but noted that with a zero setback, the options of where to move things on the site were very limited.

“[Council is] not going to sign this without a plan attached,” said Vice Chairman Ron Knabb.

“We are bound by our front yard setback being at the sidewalk,” DeMutis said, though he then agreed to submit a plan for the conditional use.

Knabb said he worried that all the conditions proposed—at the beginning of the evening, there were more than 30, whittled down to 29—might tie the hands of the developer to do something good with the property.

“They want to do something the great here, and it could be that we’re so restrictive with what … we’d approve that they don’t have a chance,” Knabb said.

Many of the conditions that were scrapped in the course of the planning commission meeting were either redundant with other conditions or could be held off on until the subdivision and land development portion of the process.

With the planning commission’s recommendation, an action memo including the 29 proposed conditions will go to borough council at its July 12 meeting. Council will then decide to schedule a hearing, which won’t be during a borough council meeting, but will be separate and public, for the conditional use application.

The plan would then come back to the planning commission as part of the subdivision and land development process.

As a recommending body, the planning commission has no final say on approval, but can make suggestions to council and work with developers to ensure plans fit the borough’s ordinances.  


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