Site of shooting, party house in Lower Heidelberg is locked up

by Steve Reinbrecht

A thick bolt and padlock on the door of a Lower Heidelberg house are designed to keep out unwelcome partiers after a teenage boy was shot July 17 when dozens of young people thronged to the Green Valley neighborhood for an early morning after-party.

The next day, police arrested an 18-year-old Reading man and charged him with attempted murder in the shooting.

Township police are still investigating and have suspects in other violence that broke out on the street, Hill Terrace Drive, before the shooting, Detective Chris Stouch said Friday.

The shooting is the only attempted murder with a firearm in Lower Heidelberg that Stouch recalls in his 10 years with the township. He said violence is rare in the township, which has about 6,000 residents.

“This is very unlike Lower Heidelberg. The biggest problem we have is an influx of outside people coming in.”

As many as 150 mostly young people in about 40 vehicles swarmed into the neighborhood about 2:15 that Sunday morning. Most had been at a club in Bern Township. When it closed at 2 a.m., someone told the DJ to announce an after-party at 4219 Hill Terrace.

They couldn't fit in the house,so they milled on the street. Within minutes after they arrived, several groups started fighting outside the house. According to the Reading Eagle, the defendant took a gun from his vehicle and fired a few shots in a dispute over a girl. The victim, from Muhlenberg Township, was hit in the arm.

About 10 police officers from several departments detained, identified and questioned dozens of partiers, though many fled. No one from Lower Heidelberg or Southwestern Berks was involved, Stouch said.

The house has a legal tenant but nobody is living there and young people have used it for parties. County records show that Eleni and Maria Soulimiotis, in care of Mark Shoener of Spring Township, bought it in December 2007.

An attorney representing the owner installed the lock and further secured the house at the township’s request, Supervisor Cheryl Johnson said Saturday.

At their meeting July 18, neighbor Mark Wallace urged township supervisors to deal with the house, which he said has been a problem for more than a year.

Wallace said police responded quickly to many complaints about loud parties at the house, but a shooting showed the problem had become urgent.

New housing shows signs of life in Southwestern Berks County

By Steve Reinbrecht

The number of new homes built each year in Berks County declined sharply over the last 10 years.

But there are signs of a reinvigorated housing market in Southwestern Berks County.

Crews have been turning rich farm fields in Lower Heidelberg into lots for up-scale housing. And work is expected to start this fall on 60 new houses in South Heidelberg, with hundreds of units eventually, adjacent to Wernersville. 

The home-building industry has not recovered in Berks County as fast as in the rest of Pennsylvania. The recession that started in 2008 decimated the housing industry in the region and the United States. In Berks County, only 417 new housing units came to the market in 2015 -- the lowest number since at least 1980, except for 2011, when only 388 came on the tax rolls. The highest recent number of new homes in Berks was 2,787 in 2001. Overall, Berks had nearly 165,000 housing units in 2015, with about 11,000 of them vacant, according to the Census.

Last year, Lower Heidelberg had the second-most new houses in Berks County -- 31 units. It’s one township in Berks where developers are installing roads and big houses on large lots.

Grande Development Co. started developing 49 acres of former farmland in Lower Heidelberg, around the Wilson School District middle and elementary schools, in 2013. Plans call for 77 single-family homes, mostly on quarter-acre lots, and 30 semi-detached homes, along Gaul Road.

Grande is also building 56 houses on one-acre lots on 87 acres, across from the school, that he bought from another developer, Greth Development Group Inc., for $1.6 million in March, 2014.

Some might credit the relative quality of the Wilson School District for keeping the area in the forefront of new housing. The Oley Valley School District saw 79 new houses in 2015, by far the most that year. But Wilson School District had the next highest number of new homes – 45. Conrad Weiser School District had 33 new homes.

In South Heidelberg, supervisors gave final approval in September to the South Mountain Commons development, nearly 190 acres generally bounded by Furnace, Preston, and Galen Hill roads and Glen Till Avenue.

The builder, LLH LP, of Wyomissing, bought the property from VIST Bank for $1.4 million in May 2015 and plans to build single homes, townhouses and apartments. The land is zoned agricultural but will get a mixed-use overlay, and the homes will use public water and sewer.

South Mountain Commons

Crews are expected to start work on the first phase, comprised of 60 single-family houses, in the fall. They’ll be around a loop road on a 37.5-acre plot off Columbus Street. An extension of Glen Till Avenue will be another entrance.

The final plans show 132 townhouse units on 27 acres off Galen Hill Road and 240 apartments on 10 acres.

In 2006, three Southwestern Berks municipalities were in the top 11 home-building municipalities of Berks County’s 67 municipalities: South Heidelberg was 8th with 77, Lower Heidelberg was ninth with 70, and Sinking Spring was 11th with 39.

The United States had a big uptick in housing starts in June. Demand for homes has been growing in recent years, with sales of new and existing homes rising fairly steadily since 2011, with a low number of new and existing homes on the market.

“The conditions underpinning demand are still in place, namely historically low interest rates and steady—if slowly moderating—job creation,” according to the Wall Street Journal. “Tuesday’s report showed an estimated 1.015 million homes under construction in June, the highest level since February 2008.”

From 2006-2015, three southwestern municipalities – South Heidelberg, Lower Heidelberg, and Sinking Spring -- were among the 20 Berks municipalities with the most new housing units. They had 713 units out of Berks’ 8,443 total during that time.

Southwestern Berk’s comprehensive plan identified no housing problems in the region. The planned growth of housing, including much around Wilson West Middle School, matches the expected growth in the number of new people, planners surmise.

In general, new housing is an important economic measure. Construction employs a lot of people, and buyers need to fill their new homes with furniture, flooring and all sorts of stuff they buy in local stores. Transactions provide the crumbs the real estate and finance people depend on. New construction also boosts tax revenue.

But many people oppose new housing. The property taxes raised don’t pay for the demand for new services, such as police presence and seats in classrooms. Many residents rue the loss of farmland and the vistas it comprises, and accuse developers of environmental damage and causing too much traffic on winding country roads.

Some people fear a housing shortage and think apartments, condominiums and townhouses are the answer. In May, the Lancaster newspaper had a well-reported and -researched story concluding that the county just south of Southwestern Berks needed more multi-family housing units, in other words, apartment buildings.

“Lancaster County has long suffered from a lack of affordable housing,” the Morning Call said.

The article predicted Lancaster would gain more than 122,000 new residents by 2040, with Baby Boomers downsizing and Millennials putting off buying traditional single-family homes in the suburbs.

“The supply just isn't keeping up. Single-family homes still account for up to 80 percent of the housing being built in Lancaster County.”

Southwestern Berks County is clearly Trump Country

by Steve Reinbrecht

Southwestern Berks County is a strong Republican bastion in a state that has gone for Democratic presidents since 1992. It's the kind of place the GOP will need to swing the state toward a path to the presidency.

Almost twice as many voters in Southwestern Berks County [South Heidelberg, Lower Heidelberg, Wernersville, and Sinking Spring] chose Donald Trump than voted for either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders in the primary elections in April.

Many voters here likely are traditional conservatives. In other parts of the state, Trump is convincing voters -- Democrats or people who generally don't vote -- to support a different kind of Republican.

And winning Pennsylvania could help Trump win the presidency.

Adding up votes in Southwestern Berks in the 2016 primary, Republican candidates Trump, Ted Cruz and John Kasich together got just more than 3,100 votes.

In the primary, 600 voted for Kasich and 607 voted for Cruz. But Trump has converted the former Cruz supporter from Lower Heidelberg in this Reading Eagle story, who went to the convention.

Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders got just more than 2,100 together.

The area usually has a wide Republican majority.

Sinking Spring and Wernersville voters chose President Obama over John McCain in 2008. Since then, the area has been solidly Republican.

In the last two presidential elections, Southwestern Berks voted for the losing Republican candidate each time.

No harm, no foul for cutting lots of trees in Lower Heidelberg

by Steve Reinbrecht

A company that removed trees from its Lower Heidelberg property won’t be penalized although it probably should have given the township and state a plan to control erosion from the work.

Those kinds of rules are important to keep soil from running into streets and creeks and avoid flooding problems on adjacent land, said Tammy Bartsch, office administrator of the Berks County Conservation District, speaking in general, not about this case.

To find out if the owner submitted an erosion-control plan for this project would require filing a right-to-know request, she said.

Alpha Property Investments LLC wants to build 28 housing units on the 8.75-acre parcel on Gaul Road, just north of Penn Avenue. It’s unclear when the trees were cut. Brush covers the sloping plot, which lies between a driveway to a parking lot behind the restaurant to the south and a home at 70 Gaul Road to the north.

In general, it’s OK to cut trees on your property, but if you’re working on more than 5,000 square feet [about 70x70 feet], you’re probably using heavy vehicles and need to submit a plan to control the erosion.

On April 18, Alpha Property gave the township a sketch plan for 28 semi-detached houses on the lot. It’s zoned residential. According to the planning maps, much of the land has slopes greater than 15 percent and some greater than 25 percent. Such steep slopes create erosion problems.

Greth Development Group Inc. sold the now-deforested land to Alpha Property for $220,000 in the fall of 2014. Berks County records show Alpha Property has a mailing address at 4226 Hill Terrace, Green Valley, which is owned by New Horizon Construction Inc., which shares an address with the Bar-B-Q Pit restaurant, 4741 Penn Ave., owned by Hippocrates “Lucky” Deligiannis, of Sinking Spring. 

Deligiannis said he plans to start building when he gets the approvals. He didn’t think the slopes would be a problem. He hung up when asked about the trees.

Though Alpha Property should not have removed the trees, the township does not expect to seek a penalty, township secretary Theresa Connors said. The land had been a tree farm, so the trees were grown to be cut, Connors said.

Here’s the state’s timber rule verbiage:

“Operations that will disturb 5,000 square feet or more of earth (~0.11 acres - which encompasses most harvesting operations) are required to develop a written Erosion and Sedimentation Control Plan (E&S Plan) that outlines the nature of the operation, the BMPs that will be used to prevent erosion and sedimentation, and a plan for how those BMPs will be maintained. The plan is required to be on site at all times during the operation.”

Lower Heidelberg farm owner ordered to remove perfectly good farmhouse

by Steve Reinbrecht

A Lower Heidelberg landowner must remove a beautifully restored farmhouse because he violated a deed restriction when he built a new house on the property.

The owner, Leonard Leibman, has publicized his plight with a sign at the property at 190 Evans Hill Road. He bought the bucolic 83-acre farm for $960,000 in May 2010 and has renovated a large barn as well as building a new home behind the existing farmhouse.

The trouble is, Berks Nature, a conservation agency, decided the new house violates the terms of a deed restriction from the 1970s, said Tami J. Shimp, vice-president of development and community relations.

Leibman was aware that the land was permanently protected when he bought the land, she said.

Leibman told me he fought to keep the house but put the sign up about six weeks ago when he realized he was beaten. Few have shown interest. He said he spent $90,000 five years ago to renovate the farmhouse, close to the road. He hopes somebody will pay him $20,000 for it and can move it or rebuild it somewhere. He said he spent $400,000 renovating the barn.

The farmhouse tenants moved out two weeks ago, reminding Leibman he'll be losing $24,000 a year in rent.

"They would have stayed there forever. They loved the place."

Berks Nature takes every restriction seriously, Shimp said.

“We commit to protecting it in perpetuity as the land owner requested.”

If the agency gave in on cases like this, it would compromise the entire program, she said. The Berks Nature board voted to uphold the deed, she said.

At first, Leibman said, Berks Nature staff assured him the second house would be permitted, so he paid $40,000 for the plans and tests required to build.

He filed a lawsuit when the conservancy reversed itself and prohibited the second house. But a lawyer told him the matter could take years to resolve, and Leibman wanted to move into the new house.

“We decided we’ll rip the house down and be done with it.”

Shimp expects Leibman to remove the house, and the sign seems to indicate his intentions.

Neighbors urge action on Lower Heidelberg house after teenager gets shot during party

By Steve Reinbrecht

The 16-year-old boy shot early Sunday morning after a party in a vacant house in Lower Heidelberg was released from the hospital and is doing OK, a neighbor said Monday.

A boy was shot after a party in this house
at 4219 Hill Terrace, Lower Heidelberg.

Before declining further comment, the young woman said the victim was a family member of hers, lives in Muhlenberg Township, and was shot in an arm.

As many as 150 people were at the party from about 1 a.m. until about 2:30 a.m., when fighting started outside and the boy was shot.

Neighbors reported hearing about six shots.

Township police arrested an 18–year-old man from Reading on Monday and charged him with attempted homicide, the Reading Eagle reported. 

Police have not identified the victim or said if they had a suspect. Township Detective Chris Stouch said Monday that he would be able to release more information Tuesday.

The house at 4219 Hill Terrace, the left side of a duplex, has a history of problems.

Sinking Spring residents vow to oppose PP&L power line

by Steve Reinbrecht

About 80 people sat or stood in Sinking Spring Borough Hall on Thursday to hear about PP&L’s plans to run a 69-kilovolt line through the borough and, officials say, fatally disrupt plans to improve traffic and shopping opportunities.

Appearing aghast, planner Sam Loth told the crowd that the electric company’s plans would flush eight years of work and $6 million of tax investment down the toilet.

Residents asked questions and vowed to fight the utility’s plans.

Borough Manager Michael Hart said he invited PP&L officials, who declined to come and said that they would arrange a meeting with residents. PP&L, based in Allentown, has about 10 million customers and saw $7.7 billion in revenues last year. 

In what they call BOSS2020, borough leaders have made plans to improve two bottle-neck intersections on Penn Avenue and make room for a downtown business district.

Residents and drivers will soon see concrete signs of the project, Loth said.

Sinking Spring says 69,000-volt line will clash with development plans

By Steve Reinbrecht

Here is a small town with big plans to fix up its business district versus a utility giant that wants to hang a new 69,000-volt line through it – which could snarl plans to improve some of the worst traffic in Berks County.

PP&L Electrical Utilities plans to build a new electrical line through the borough. Sinking Spring-area residents are invited to a council meeting at 7 p.m. Thursday night. I couldn't find an agenda on the borough website, but I expect the topic to come up.

Sinking Spring officials say the line would disrupt plans to redevelop the downtown, plans in the works for a long time and already at considerable taxpayer investment.

The line’s 100-foot right-of-way will go through downtown and affect revitalization and hundreds of residents, eliminating a wide path of development, Borough Manager Michael Hart said at a meeting in June, according to the Reading Eagle.

Poles that carry 69 kilovolts are typically wooden and 50 to 70 feet tall. The cleared right-of-way is typically 70-100 feet wide, according to Minnesota Electric Transmission Planning.

The line would cross Penn Avenue between Autozone and Paparone’s pizza shop, according to a map from PP&L.