It is expected that the Manheim Board of Commissioners will vote on whether to give High a conditional approval for the Crossings at a special Crossings hearing next Monday. According to Dave O’Connor’s news story covering last week’s regular meeting, this hearing will be held at 6:30 p.m., at the Manheim Twp. Municipal Building.
There have been frequent meetings by the Commissioners on the Crossings project at various times and locations in the past several months, most of which were not properly advertised as required by PA’s Sunshine Law. Many citizens believe that High’s representatives and the present Board have been pushing to get the project to a vote by the end of this month, when two current members (President Carol Simpson and Larry Downing) retire from the board.
Simpson and Downing will be replaced by two new members who were voted into office by the electorate in November. These two new members – who have been attending these hearings – have not said how they would vote, but they have asked that a vote on the Crossings be delayed until the new board is seated in January.
The new members not only want a chance to vote on the project, but also to have a voice in the list of conditions that will be attached to the approval. (These conditions will largely have to do with improvements on roadways and intersections carrying Crossings traffic.) This is a reasonable request on the part of the newly-elected members, but the present board is ignoring that request.
The current Crossings high-density development plan includes 211,000 square feet of commercial space, 258 upscale apartments and a 75,000-square-foot hotel. It has been estimated by an independent source that the complex will increase traffic on Harrisburg Pike by 2,000 cars and that another 2,000 will use the two entrances/exits planned that connect with Farmingdale Road – a local road entirely inadequate in its present condition to carry this amount of traffic.
