Murrysville planners consider auto body shop, beer distributor, additional homes in Summerhill Place
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Murrysville planning commissioners recommended approval last week for development of a beer distributor on the same property as the Sunoco station at Berlin Farm Road and Route 22.
Your Daily Brew, operated by Sunoco’s owners, would be open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. weekdays, and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays, said Ed Patton of Patton Engineering.
The facade will be the same color and brick size as the existing Sunoco station.
By state law, the beer distributor must be a stand-alone structure. It would be to the left of the current Sunoco convenience store, roughly 2,500 square feet in size, Patton said.
He added that the Sunoco owners are not planning additional signage for the beer distributor.
The commission’s recommendation will be forwarded to Murrysville council to take a vote on approving the development.
Other items
• The commission also voted unanimously to accept a site plan for Caliber Collision, a proposal for an automotive service center at 6037 William Penn Highway.
Project developers are requesting to build a roughly 12,500-square-foot repair center as well as subdivide an 8.8-acre property into two lots. The property is in the business district. It will be back on the commission’s agenda in December.
Troy Smith, who lives on Berkshire Drive near the proposed development, said he doesn’t understand why Caliber chose the property, at the northwestern edge of a large wooded area along the south side of Route 22.
“This place will be right at our back porch,” Smith said. “We’re used to seeing trees and animals, and now we’re just going to see a body shop, which is ridiculous. I don’t know why they’d want to build it there.”
The commission’s vote is not a recommendation for approval. The proposal will now come before the commission at a future meeting, which will go into more detail about the project.
• Commissioners opted not to accept a site plan for what was billed as a second phase adding 61 duplex-type townhouses in the Summerhill Place housing plan.
Currently, Summerhill consists of about 50 townhouse units off Logan Ferry Road on Murrysville’s western border with Plum. Engineer Jeff Parobek said the development was originally approved for 94 units, including three apartment buildings that were not ultimately constructed.
“Part of the original approval was for 10-unit apartment buildings, and those would be replaced with two-, three- and four-unit duplex-type townhouses,” Parobek told the commission.
Planning Chair Jayne Hoy noted that much of the material that should be submitted with this type of application was missing.
“There’s no planning module, no environmental impact statement,” Hoy said. “I think we need to get our ducks in a row on this before we accept it.”
Murrysville Community Development Coordinator Jim Morrison said the proposal would need to be submitted as a new preliminary site plan.