MORGANTOWN – “I think we’ve reached an impasse,” Monongalia County Director of Planning Andrew Gast-Bray said Wednesday evening, well over an hour into the Monongalia County Planning Commission’s regular meeting.
Gast-Bray’s intervention came during a spirited and increasingly circular debate within the commission regarding a developer’s plan to build 108 townhomes on 12 acres of property near the intersection of West Run and St. Clair Hill roads.
The commission’s charge was not to determine whether such a development can be built in that location. It can, by right. The land falls within a high-density residential (R-4) zone of the county’s West Run Planning District.
It’s the commission’s job to set forth what would be required to do so through its review of the major development of significant impact plan that spells out how the developer intends to mitigate impacts on the surrounding area.
Or, as MCPC President Matthew Ridgway explained, “We have an obligation to give him the right to do what he needs with this land, but per this ordinance, we also have an obligation to the residents of the district to make sure that what we approve doesn’t impose unfairly on them as well.”
In the end, after hearing from representatives of the project as well as a half dozen or so potentially impacted residents and property owners – and conducting multiple failed votes with a range of various conditions tacked on – the commission decided it needed more information.
A motion to table the matter passed 5-1, with Commissioner Vince Putkowski voting in the minority.
Specifically, the commission said it will not take up the case again until the development team provides a new, or significantly updated, traffic study.
Throughout all the back and forth, the inadequacy of St. Clair Hill Road was never debated. Despite coming in at roughly a quarter-mile long in its entirety, and being too narrow for vehicles to pass one another along much of its length, the road routinely turns into a major cut-through between West Run Road and Bakers Ridge Road.
Chad Griffith, of Potesta & Associates, explained that the first order of business for the development would be to work with the West Virginia Division of Highways to address the St. Clair Hill intersection with West Run Road and widen St. Clair Hill Road to 22 feet along the entire frontage of the developed property. Vehicles leaving the development would be encouraged to use the wider portion down to West Run until the DOH widened the remaining upper segment to Bakers Ridge Road.
Even so, members of the commission, including Ridgway and Darin Glitz, advocated that the traffic study provided, though cleared by the DOH, was inadequate in ways that couldn’t be overlooked.
One, they argued, the traffic counts were conducted during the summer when Morgantown traffic is lightest.
Two, it focused almost exclusively on West Run Road, and didn’t consider impacts to surrounding roads and intersections including Bakers Ridge Road, Riddle Avenue and others.
Three, the original traffic impact report calculated the 108 two- and three-bedroom townhomes as units for purchase, meaning they’re calculated as single-family homes when it comes to traffic impact studies. It was explained Wednesday that the units will be rentals.
That change, Ridgway said, likely triples the calculations regarding trip frequency.
“If we look at this realistically, everybody who looks at this – 100 people out of 100 – if you said, ‘Is 108 units and an extra three trips per unit, per day during peak hours going to make this infrastructure level of service go up or go down?’ Everybody knows it’s going to go down. It’s just a matter of how much it goes down. And I would argue that it’s going to go down two levels of service if we had an accurate traffic study,” Glitz concluded. “I’m not disputing that we have a traffic study, but in good faith, I can’t take it at face value when I know it doesn’t accurately represent the traffic that we face during peak hours, let alone football weekends. So it’s folly to even begin to discuss this as if that’s an accurate representation.”
In August, the MCPC split 4-3 in approving a development of significant impact review for two, four-story apartment complexes on open parcels directly across from the Mallard Run Road entrance to The Villages at West Run – a few hundred feet along West Run Road from the development discussed Wednesday evening.
