Township officials recommend CHS parking lot changes

   A new parking lot being built at Hopewell Valley Central High School should be made smaller and its water quality safeguards tightened, the Hopewell Township Planning Board said in a unanimous vote June 14

By: John Tredrea
   A new parking lot being built at Hopewell Valley Central High School should be made smaller and its water quality safeguards tightened, the Hopewell Township Planning Board said in a unanimous vote June 14.
   The vote followed two hours of discussion and debate with school officials and neighbors of the new parking lot, which will be off Timberlane Drive near its intersection with Pennington-Harbourton Road.
   Preliminary work on the parking lot, such as the marking of trees slated for removal, already has begun.
   Under state law, the school district is not obliged to follow the Planning Board’s recommendations, which came at the conclusion of a capital project review, sometimes also referred to as a courtesy review. School district attorney Robert Martinez said during the June 14 meeting that the decision on whether to follow the Planning Board’s recommendations rests with the school board. A decision by that board on the parking recommendations is expected soon, Mr. Martinez said.
   On the issue of water quality, William Connolly and other Planning Board members said the plan for the parking lot was seriously deficient in that it entailed discharging some storm water runoff from the lot into the ground without removing hydrocarbons and other pollutants from the water first.
   "You can’t just put runoff from the parking lot into the groundwater without treating it first. That’s a very bad idea, especially when you have other wells nearby, as we do in this case," Mr. Connolly said bluntly. "You need to face up to that or you are environmentally unsound."
   Quantities of oil, gasoline, antifreeze and other fluids routinely drip from the undersides of motor vehicles onto parking lots. Rain washes some of these pollutants off the lot. In the plan brought before the township planners on June 14, some of the storm water runoff from the new lot — up to 30 percent of the annual rainfall, Mr. Connolly estimated — would have been discharged directly into the ground. This has led to fears of groundwater contamination by residents who live near the site of the new parking lot. All those residents get their drinking water from private wells.
   During a recess in the June 14 meeting, Township Engineer Paul Pogorzelski told the HVN that installation of a device known as a waterceptor in the parking lot’s water quality system could eliminate the threat of groundwater contamination. He said the waterceptor is an underground box, similar in design to a septic system, containing a series of baffles that would filter out pollutants before releasing runoff from the parking lot into the ground. Mr. Pogorzelski estimated it would cost the district $10,000 to $30,000 to install such a device for the new high school lot.
   "It’s not a big expense item," Mr. Connolly said, noting there are other technologies available, in addition to the waterceptor, for use on water quality problems such as the one involving the high school lot.
   The Planning Board’s unanimous vote also included a recommendation that the northernmost row of the parking lot be eliminated. This loss of 20 to 24 of the lot’s 247 spaces would increase the size of the buffer between the lot and the back yards of homes on Pennington-Harbourton Road.
   The board also wants the school district to work with a township landscaping consultant on how to design the buffer in such a way as to minimize, as much as possible, the impact of the parking lot on its residential neighbors.
   The board’s recommendation on improving the parking lot’s water quality safeguards is being forwarded to the state Department of Education, which has jurisdiction over construction projects at public schools.