Southwestern Berks suffers few opioid overdoses, coroner's office says

by Steve Reinbrecht

It’s clear the world is having trouble controlling its use of opioid painkillers, with overdose deaths rising drastically in recent years in the United States, Pennsylvania and Berks County – but not in Southwestern Berks County.

In Berks, 64 people died of drug overdoses in 2014; and 69 died in 2015. Berks has had 22 heroin-related deaths this year through June, the Reading Eagle reported Monday.

But Southwestern Berks County has avoided many opioid deaths. The area – Lower Heidelberg, South Heidelberg, Sinking Spring, Wernersville -- had no opioid-related deaths in 2014 or so far this year, according to the Berks County coroner’s office. Drug information before 2014 was not stored in spreadsheets and is not feasibly searched.

In 2015, three people died of opioid-related causes in Southwestern Berks. A 31-year-old man died in his Sinking Spring home of an accidental overdose of Oxycontin.

Also that year, two men, ages 24 and 33, took heroin and fentanyl in the Wernersville Community Corrections Center in South Heidelberg and died of accidental overdoses. One died at the facility; one died at Reading Hospital.

In 2015, two other inmates of the state-run correctional center were charged with having heroin. One was caught selling heroin in Reading on work-release. The other had 36 packets of heroin in the center.

In other local opioid-abuse-related news, the Caron Foundation, another South Heidelberg institution, plans to borrow as much as $28.5 million to help build a 21-bed treatment facility at its campus near Wernersville.

Local police chiefs say opioids have not been a big problem in Southwestern Berks, nothing like a spike in abuse in the Topton area. At least five people from the Brandywine Heights area died from drug overdoses in early 2014.

In Pennsylvania, almost 3,400 people died of overdoses in 2015, up from about 2,740 in 2014 and about 2,425 in 2013. That’s a 40 percent increase over two years. Most involved opioids – highly euphoric and highly addictive painkillers such as heroin, fentanyl,Vicodin and Oxycontin that are based on opium.

Many people become addicted to opiates after using painkillers prescribed by doctors. Some steal the pills, which have saturated the United States, from family member’s medicine chests. As their tolerance for the drug increases, many users switch to heroin, which is often cheaper and easier to find, as regulations and wiser doctors are tightening diverted supplies of prescription pills. Heroin from Mexico has become stronger and cheaper, and is often adulterated with other opioids like fentanyl, which can create a fatal potency. 

Dog-license crackdown in Berks has underwhelming results

by Steve Reinbrecht

When I read in early April about dog wardens armed with $300 fines coming to Berks County to check if pet dogs have licenses dangling from their collars, I did the right thing.

As I was supposed to do at the beginning of the year, I went online and laid out $13 to properly license my two mutts for 2016.

The state requires that dogs have licenses and rabies vaccines. A license is one of the best ways to be reunited with your dog if you were to become separated, the department says.

It appears that lots of people responded to the Reading Eagle’s timely warning about the state’s canine crack down.

The number of dog licenses sold in Berks in the first half of 2016 jumped 15 percent over the number sold in the first half of 2015, according to the Berks treasurer’s office.

Should we have worried about a dog warden's knock?

I estimate 90,000 pet dogs live in Berks, using a calculator from the American Veterinary Medical Association.

In 2015, the Berks treasurer sold only about 27,000 licenses, so I figure the county was ripe for wide-scale enforcement among the 63,000 unlicensed dogs here.

When the dog wardens visited the week of May 9, they checked 753 houses in Berks County, according to Neil Logan, a state agriculture department spokesman.

They issued two citations in Berks County for not having a current rabies vaccination, he said. 

They issued no citations for not having a valid dog license.

Hall said the wardens typically give warnings so scofflaw dog owners have a chance to get their pooches legal. The idea is to educate owners, not penalize them.

In 2015, individual dog license sales generated about $6.3 million in revenue for Pennsylvania.

Sinking Spring hopes politician can sway PPL’s high-voltage line plans

by Steve Reinbrecht

The electric company is not budging on its plans to run a high-voltage line through the middle of Sinking Spring, effectively gouging a 100-foot wide no-man’s-land through the middle of the borough’s renaissance plans.

PPL Electric Utilities is “continuing discussions” with borough officials and “other interested parties regarding our preferred route for the new transmission line,” spokesman Joe Nixon said in an e-mail.

He doesn’t mention any options to the path.

Sam Loth, in charge of Sinking Spring’s ambitious redevelopment project, says the battle has landed in the lap of state Sen. David Argall, a Republican who represents the area.

Argall supports the borough’s opposition to PPL’s proposed route, Christine Verdier, Argall’s chief of staff, told me in a call last week that. However, she said there hadn’t been meetings between Argall staff and PPL officials in the past couple of weeks, and that none had been scheduled. She said Argall has sent a letter to the power company opposing the placement of the wires.

“We haven’t got a whole lot of correspondence back from PPL,” she said.

Loth says it’s hard to believe the power company decided to put the line through the borough even though company officials attended early meetings about the project. Plans call for 450,000 square feet of commercial, office, retail and food operations, about 100 housing units and $60 million in private investment.

PPL says the new power line is needed to make electric service more reliable for thousands of homes and businesses in Sinking Spring and the surrounding region. Based in Allentown, the company has about 10 million customers and saw $7.7 billion in revenues last year. 

The right-of-way is the issue, Loth said. It cuts the plans in half.

“We remain committed to avoiding interference with future road relocations,” Nixon wrote. The path appears clear of work planned at the major intersections.

But Loth said he’s not sure that even a park could be installed in the right-of-way.

“I’m not sure how many people would want to sit under high-tension wires.”

Map from PPL

Loth has asked the power company to bury the line, to no avail.

It would cost 10 times as much to bury the lines, with customers paying the bill, Nixon wrote. Also, it’s harder to fix underground lines.

“We don’t feel it would be appropriate to pass the cost of that work onto our customers when there is a viable above ground route. That is why we have determined that this line will be built above ground.”

A major concern for the borough is whether even a buried 65,000-volt line on the site would discourage the major private developers needed to fund most of the project, Roth said.

It’s not unusual for the company to build new lines in developed areas, Nixon wrote.

“Power lines need to be built close to the areas where our customers use electricity.”

An example of a recent project was the construction of the 5-mile Honey Brook – Twin Valley transmission line in Chester, Lancaster and Berks counties, Nixon wrote.

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.”