Letter to the Editor: Resident Takes Board of Supervisors to Task for '1990s Vision'

To All The Moon Township Board Of Supervisors,
I am writing to you supervisors because it appears that your vision for Moon Township is still in the 1990s, and not in the 21st century. I have written time and time again trying to move you into pro-active action when it comes to the Wal-Mart property. The property is still tied up with PennDOT.

If Wal-Mart is denied an HOP and further permits to build, what will you do? You need to be ready to rezone the property into mixed use, and include it within the Overlay District allowing for a better use of the property.

Our comprehensive plan and overlay district concept of creating a "town center" has been a fake and fraud, as well as a joke. There is no such thing, or vision. It exists in name only, like a child's imaginary friend. Time and energy and money were spent creating a comprehensive plan with an overlay district, yet nothing in Moon Township has changed to illustrate the sincerity of the plan with its town center concept.

In Thursday's Post Gazette (5-3-13), you will find how communities around us that are trying to reinvent themselves by creating town center developments with mixed use designs. 

Pine Township has a residential development, called the Village at Pine, which has created a mixed use design with green space included all accessed by foot. "The Village at Pine is a 174 acre mixed-use community that includes several types of housing, office space, and a variety of stores and service businesses, both large and small. This is a little town," developer Dominic Gigliotti Sr. said of the project. "You can get your hair cut, laundry, and dry cleaning done and go to the food store or to restaurants."

The article said, "the formal name for a community like this under Pine's building code is a "town center planned development overlay. The result is a neighborhood that resembles a small town Main Street and surrounding residential streets."

Monessen, located in the Mon Valley, has suffered from economic decline and closed commercial spaces, along with depreciating property values. The governing bodies are working to try and remake the community by enticing artists to move in and create art spaces. The community would be willing to take over abandoned properties, redo them and then, resell the reinvented properties.
More and more communities are aware that they cannot live in the 1990s and must move into the 21st century by recreating their communities into walkable and livable places. They see that isolated suburban locales are outdated and are not as desirable as those communities that offer mixed use developments.
The article said, "...to create new downtowns like the Village at Pine are rare." Resident Fran Ryce said living in the Village at Pine reminds her of what life was like growing up in her home town of Monessen. 'You could walk everywhere...I can head out the back door and get to restaurants, run errands or do grocery shopping.'"

The Moon Township supervisors have their heads in the past, and will, once again, miss opportunities to create a town center within its Overlay District. The opportunity to envelope a major university into a mixed use: residential, retail, commercial/flex space/ R and D town center continues to be missed. 

There have always been rumors surrounding the corporate viability of the Moon Township Kmart. Will a sudden closing and possible reconfiguring of the site be ready for our officials? We need to be ready to incorporate the community's vision with the next big vacancy. 

The center of Moon Township had a vision for a town center. Once again, the community leaders of Moon Township don't fix problems but only perpetuate them. 
If Wal-Mart decides to abandon its current big box store development plan and sell the property or propose something else, YOU better be ready to reinvent that space or else you will be thrown to the mat like you were when Wal-Mart handed you their super store plan.

There are community leaders with eyes toward the future. They see that the vision of a "strip mall town center" with a hodge-podge of commercial buildings with no continuity to one another as a dying breed. 

The Board of Supervisors in Moon Township, along with the planning commission, and zoning board members have no real vision and appear to lacking a common vision, which is being missed time and time again. In addition, our manager should be hammering for a vision that is spoken across all boards. But, that appears to be absent. 

The appeared mantra for Moon Township is, "We Take What We Can Get, And That Is About All!"

Sincerely,

Jerry Pearl