Success! North Whitehall Approves Ordinance Changes

SUCCESS!  

The North Whitehall Township Board of Supervisors has passed a change to ordinance 2006-2 that controls building of Over 55 Retirement Communities within the Township.  The stated intention of the changes listed below is to make the retirement communities more closely reflect the existing communities in the township, and to promote the development of the communities in areas with existing higher density neighborhoods instead in the more rural areas of the township.

What these mean to us is that if an Over 55 development is constructed in the portion of Strawberry Acres adjacent to our development it will contain fewer houses, spaced further apart, and built only on portions of the site that has less than 25% slopes.   This coupled with the Township’s firm stand that drip style waste disposal systems are not allowed within the existing ordinances (resulting in the need to build and maintain through a Municipal Authority a very costly full sewage treatment plant) that the financial cost/benefit of such a development will not be attractive to developers.

I know that this result falls short of a desire to completely ban these types of development in rural areas of the Township, but this is realistically the best outcome we could expect.   Federal rules under the Fair Housing considerations require that all townships allow Retirement Communities that fit within the character of the overall community.  These changes update the existing ordinance to require that such a community respect and reflect the type of existing houses, and the open widely spaced character of our rural area.

The organization board will be meeting shortly to develop recommendations about our activities in the future.  Please contact Lynn Allen, Heather Skorinko or Tom VanVreede if you have any suggestions.  Or hold the suggestions until we organize an organization group meeting to discuss or future.   One thing I feel strongly that we will need to do is to completely pay off the money we owe the lawyer, and suspend our relationship with him unless a new development proposal is filed that requests variances form the updated ordinance.

Thanks you all for your participation!