Municipalities Discuss Aggressive Development

The six members of the Southwestern Lehigh County Comprehensive Plan met Wednesday for the first time since the document was signed eight years ago.

The plan, signed by the boroughs of Emmaus, Alburtis and Macungie and Upper Milford and Lower Milford townships, was designed to control development and preserve open space throughout the region.

It mandates that those who signed the agreement send to the other partners notice of any potential zoning changes for review and comment.

Upper Milford Supervisor Rob Sentner first mentioned calling all the municipalities together about three months ago. He opened the meeting with a statement calling for and for the most part, there was none.

Times have changed since the document was signed. Lower Milford Supervisor Donna Wright, also a member of the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission, was in on the tail end of the $80,000 project then and was the only one at the Wednesday meeting who was also an elected official then.

The group is required by the state to update the plan every 10 years, and agreed that it was about time they start.

They also agreed that the biggest problem that has developed over the past eight years is the traffic throughout the region.

Wright said that even though Lower Milford has no major highways, there are 3,500 cars a day that travel along Kings Highway.

“That was between 500 and 700 per day 15 years ago,” she said.

Emmaus representative Michael Hoffman said that tractor-trailer traffic is making it very difficult to walk through his walkable community, and Sentner said the traffic along Route 29 makes traveling very difficult, too.

“PennDOT needs to step up and say no more development until we address the infrastructure,” Sentner said.

Sara Pandl, Lower Macungie’s director of planning and development who represented Lower Macungie along with Township Engineer William Erdman, said that Lower Mac has had luck working with PennDOT.

“Maybe we should gang up on PennDOT as a group,” Wright said.

Another problem with the plan as it stands is that it has no teeth.

“There need to be consequences for not complying,” Sentner said.

Other members agreed it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to impose consequences for non-compliance, but Sentner was not deterred.

“I don’t want to point fingers, but everybody knows how I feel,” he said, referring to a statement he made months ago that development in Lower Macungie was “destroying the quality of life” in Upper Milford.

“We read it,” Pandl said.

The meeting touched on several general topics surrounding the shared consequences of development.

Jason Schweyer, a member of the Alburtis Planning Commission, and Macungie Borough Council President Christopher Becker also participated.

The six communities agreed to meet again on May 29 with a time and place to be announced.