Ron Seaman leaving, South Heidelberg needs a new manager or two

by Steve Reinbrecht

South Heidelberg Township Manager Ron Seaman started working for the township in May 2003 after a career in Berks County government.

Now Seaman, 63, is returning to county government, and an office in Reading, to be Berks County’s chief administrative officer, the county's top non-elected post. The three Berks commissioners voted Thursday to appoint him.

After 13 years, Seaman will leave the township offices Aug. 12 and begin work for the county Aug. 17.

“These types of things don’t come along more than once in a lifetime,” he said

His exit means the township is stuck looking for a new manager. Or maybe two.

He said supervisors are considering hiring two administrators. One would manage public works – roads, storm management, parks. The other would take care of finances and day-to-day operations.

In the meantime, office manager Shelly B. Keehn will be in charge.

Berks County’s chief operations officer, Carl Geffken, left in March for a similar job in Arkansas.

Commissioner Kevin Barnhardt, a township resident, said the job opening came up informally in a conversation between him and Seaman. When Seaman said he was interested, Barnhardt and the two other commissioners decided to choose him or eliminate him before starting a search.

Workers violate erosion rules in leaving South Heidelberg slope naked

by Steve Reinbrecht

I've updated this with new information from PennDOT.

July 28

A contractor hired by PennDOT violated environmental regulations in a project at Penn Avenue and Green Valley Road, in Lower Heidelberg, across from the Sheetz.

“The earth disturbance is related to a Penn Dot project; there was a complaint and violations which have been temporarily resolved,” Berks County Conservation District spokeswoman Tammi Bartsch told me in an e-mail. “All parties are working towards a final resolution.”

J.D. Eckman, of Atglen, is the main contractor on the project, said PennDOT spokesman Sean Brown. The workers have installed more erosion control as required, he said.

In an arrangement with the state, the county conservation districts handle initial complaints about erosion problems, such as giant machines tearing off turf and exposing bare soil on a slope.

Empty Sinking Spring stores are getting attention; fitness gym will open soon

by Steve Reinbrecht

Owners of an anchorless Sinking Spring shopping center are in talks with businesses interested in opening stores in the Spring Market shops off Penn Avenue.

This is good news for the Spring Market, 3564 Penn Ave., where wrangles among owners have slowed business activities.

“There’s certainly interest,” said Keith Seymour, a leasing agent at Equity Retail Brokers, in Plymouth Meeting, trying to find tenants. The firm would not release more information until a lease is signed, he said.

Another good sign – a gym called “Iam Fit” – plans to open in the center in September. Permits were issued in June.

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.