Scotch Road proposal is out of context

Carol Hager, Titusville
Land use planning is a complex undertaking. As a member of the Planning Board that helped devise our Hopewell Township Master Plan, I developed an appreciation for the many voices that need to be heard and the many perspectives that need to be considered so that the resultant plan preserves the integrity of the community while allowing for future growth. That’s why the proposed Master Plan revision for Scotch Road is so puzzling to me. It seems not to have proceeded in this spirit at all. It was done at the behest of a developer, and the report appears slanted toward this perspective. The result is that the planning board is facing a decision of enormous consequence with little reliable information to go on.
Participants in the Dec. 4 public hearing revealed two glaring deficits in the Banisch report (the document on which the recommended revision is based). The first, pointed out by Planning Board members themselves, is that it makes wholly unsupported claims about the need for a huge mixed-use development (it will attract millennials! COAH requires it!).
The second, pointed out by members of the public, is that it lacks any data about the proposed development’s impacts on the existing community. That’s right, it contains no information about the traffic impacts of adding 1,500-2,500 homes and large retail stores to Scotch Road. No data about the added infrastructure costs, impacts on schools, or resulting impacts on property taxes. No data on how the urbanization of an established rural community would affect that community’s sense of place and its stability. Nothing, in other words, on which an informed, inclusive discussion could occur about the benefits and costs of the envisioned development. A primary purpose of planning is to achieve coherent and appropriate land use. This clearly cannot occur if the proposed development is treated as if it were being built in a vacuum.
This report, and the prospect of a Master Plan revision based on it, violate every common-sense rule of good planning I know of. Before greenlighting the largest development project in the history of Hopewell Township, the Planning Board needs to take a long, hard look, with the community and with adequate data, at its broader impacts.