Ft. Washington office park to tackle flood problems

As floodwaters receded at the Fort Washington Office Park after Sunday's downpour, business owners stuck with yet another muddy, spirit-breaking cleanup voiced their impatience.

The frustration was not directed at nature's fury, but at the pace of Upper Dublin Township's efforts to protect them from it.

"What are they waiting for?" Savino Costanzo, owner of Granite Galleria, asked as he tried to find a way around a 4-foot-deep lake in front of his business.

Total cost of the damage that Sunday's 31/2-plus inches of rain inflicted on the 563-acre office park and nearby businesses along Pennsylvania Avenue in Whitemarsh Township was estimated yesterday at $10 million, at the least.

Soggy carpets, squishy drywall, and swamped cars aside, Upper Dublin officials contended that progress has been made in addressing the business campus' vexing flooding problems, which date to 1963, when the complex was built on swampland.

From an economic standpoint, "this is the top priority," said Upper Dublin Commissioner Robert J. Pesavento, chairman of the township's economic development and finance committee. "Everybody realizes that the work has to be done."

Also understood is that it will require lots of money - something in short supply to local governments in these recession-stressed times.

Upper Dublin officials estimate that $25 million to $30 million will be needed to design and install the stormwater-management systems recommended by Temple University. The school's Center for Sustainable Communities studied the office park's flooding for two years before releasing its suggested action plan last August.

Still undetermined, though expected to be sizable, is the cost of carrying out Temple's most radical recommendation: buying out the property owners in high-risk flood areas, tearing down as many as 22 office buildings and warehouses there, and relocating them to higher, drier ground.

Finding money is the priority right now, said Steve Lester, a former civil engineer for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. Upper Dublin hired him as a consultant in January to help bring about a water rescue of the office park.

Lester's focus at the moment is on securing a $20 million grant through the state's H2O PA program. Established by the General Assembly in July 2008, it provides 2-for-1 matching grants to municipalities or municipal authorities to assist with construction of storm-sewer projects, among other things. The application deadline is Aug. 4 of next year, with awards expected the following November.

To help position the township to outdo any competition for the funding, Upper Dublin has hired engineering giant URS to evaluate the Temple recommendations and begin design work on dams and road reconstruction. URS has an office in the Fort Washington office complex.

The Temple study also recommended ripping up about a mile of the park's main thoroughfare, Virginia Drive - a section that was largely impassable Sunday - and converting it to a planted area.

For the short term, Lester said, the township is leaning toward raising the road in places. Doing away with it entirely could take 10 years, he said, adding, "We don't have 10 years to live with the existing Virginia Drive."

By the end of summer, Upper Dublin, along with Whitemarsh, hopes to have a planning consultant lined up to study the feasibility of Temple's recommendations for transferring development in high-flood-risk areas to drier ground, where greater density would be allowed.

Known as "transfer of development rights," or TDR, the land-use tool is typically used to protect farmland from development. The study is expected to take six to eight months, Lester said.

Ted Kapnek, president of Apex Mortgage Corp., has decided there's no time like the present to make a move.

In the nine years his company has been on Commerce Drive in the office park, it has stayed dry - the beneficiary of a slight incline in an otherwise flood-vulnerable section.

Conditions were no different Sunday, though Kapnek couldn't get to his building because all the roads leading to it were flooded.

The situation affirmed a decision he made about three months ago to sign a six-year lease for 12,000 square feet in another part of the office park - on higher ground. Apex and its 48 employees are scheduled to move there in November.

The new location is on the problematic Virginia Drive, Kapnek acknowledged, where road crews with front-end loaders were clearing the road of mud Sunday afternoon after the floodwaters had subsided.

But the building has direct access to two other roads, so "even if there was a flood, we could get to our space," Kapnek said. "We're very happy."