An upcoming Upper Dublin School Board Finance Committee meeting will review plans for the location of a district-owned transportation facility, colloquially referred to as a “bus depot.”
The meeting, originally scheduled for Tuesday, March 14, has been moved to Monday, March 20.
The transportation facility’s proposed locations have drawn criticism from area residents. Lance Shapiro, Julia Watt, and Ginny Vitella, parents/residents of the district, said in an email:
After the devastating impact from two EF-2 tornados in September 2021, our community is fighting to save all open and green space in the township and do our part to help our environment. Dozens of volunteers are working hard to ‘ReLeaf’ UD with planting small trees to help community and reduce air pollution, noise pollution, etc.
Our UD School Board has renting a transportation site for over 12 years as a result of the tear down of the original bus depot, that was not rebuilt during the UDHS construction. In 2018, the school board proposed destroying the “Field of Dreams”, a well-played field that was made possible by community donations years ago. Our community rallied, ABC news came out, and the school board discarded that location. In 2021, the school board proposed a transportation facility and parking lot on green pervious land yards away from Fort Washington Elementary School – a neighborhood school with hundreds of students who get dropped off and picked up in car line as well as walk and ride bikes to school. Our community once again rallied with petitions and attended school board meetings to ask our school board to find another location. In September 2022, the school board proposed a second sight that would destroy Edwards Fields, a heavily used for soccer, baseball, softball and the UDHS Cross Country course, across the street from Maple Glen Elementary School, on lands traversed by slaves from the Underground Railroad. The two options are both too close to the elementary schools, making it unsafe for hundreds of students and will result in increased traffic, congestion, and air pollution, etc. as well as destroy open/green space.
At the same time, our UD Board of Commissioners (with the exception of 2), in order to help pay for a $52 Million Township complex that would include a public works facility and the police station as they only have $24 Million, voted to get engineering plans drawn up in order to sell a 12+ acre wooded land, marked as Open Space on the township’s Open Space Plan. This plot of land includes Rapp Run, a Wissahickon Tributary, and it is adjacent to a floodplain on Virginia Drive. The township could sell this property and a developer could build up to 500+ apartments.
Julia, who initiated a petition on the issue, added in a separate email:
According to Art 1, section 27 of the PA constitution: The people have a right to clean air, pure water and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment. PA’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. Our UD school board and BOC, should be doing what is right to protect the safety of our children by building a bus depot away from elementary schools and neighborhoods, and by preserving green space and open land in our community. It is truly becoming like precious gold as more development continues. We implore the school board to find an already impervious plot of land away from schools and neighborhoods, as well as implore our BOC to not sell any Open Space in our township.
Ginny added in a separate email:
The board is spinning that it is to save money, we say, is it really a savings? And that is no reason to force a square peg in a round hole. You can argue the numbers but the end story is that the locations, on A-Residential lots are bad.
Mark Sirota, Finance Committee Chair and Township Liaison, said in an email:
The UDSD Board of School Directors has discussed a transportation facility for several years. While the current facility’s owners have worked with the District on a renewal of our lease that expires in June, we believe it is fiscally prudent to build our own facility. Ultimately funds we are spending for rent would be repurposed to pay for our own facility over time, though finances are not the only consideration.
Recently, we have commissioned two feasibility studies to determine if two parcels of land the District owns would be suitable locations for our transportation facility. One site is adjacent to Route 309, and the other is near the District’s Administration Center on Edwards Fields.
One of the agenda items for this meeting is the location of our transportation facility. The Board has, and will continue to, receive input and feedback from the community via our public participation periods at each of our meetings. At the meeting on Monday, March 20, 2023, members of the Finance Committee expect to choose a location for the facility and recommend that location to the full Board for consideration on Monday, March 27, 2023.
The board noted that the following resource is publicly available for the community: Information Sharing Regarding Potential Transportation Sites. The document outlines the board’s plans going forward and offers answers to several Frequently Asked Questions.
Residents unable to the March 20 meeting may submit comments two days prior.