A two-year search for solutions to the chronic flooding at Fort Washington Office Park - the most notoriously soggy business campus in the region - has produced a drastic recommendation: Tear part of it down.
Under that scenario, as many as 22 office buildings and warehouses in high-risk areas of the 593-acre complex would be razed and rebuilt on higher, drier ground, and a 1.1-mile stretch of its major thoroughfare would be converted into a greenway. And that's just for starters.
The newly released report is "pretty radical, but we think [it] makes the most sense," said Jeffrey Featherstone, director of Temple University's Center for Sustainable Communities, which advises towns on how to manage growth.
In 2006, the center's team of planning, engineering and water specialists began studying the Montgomery County office park, home to nearly 100 companies with 14,000 workers.
Since the first buildings went up in 1953 - on marshland just off the Pennsylvania Turnpike interchange at Route 309 - the intractable flooding has caused tens of millions of dollars in property damage, killed a pedestrian, swamped cars, and routinely forced businesses to close until the tides receded. The vacancy rate is more than double that of the typical Philadelphia-area office park, with desertions blamed largely on fears of inundation.
The Temple researchers found that even state-of-the-science strategies would not effectively control flooding in most heavy rains. Their report does recommend spending $28 million to create a stormwater-management system, including six small dams on two of four creeks flowing through the site.
However, they leave no doubt as to the ultimate cure: open space, occupying about 55 acres of high-risk floodplain, or 9 percent of the campus.
The Temple report was commissioned by Upper Dublin Township, where the Fort Washington park accounts for three-quarters of the commercial real estate and adds $3.4 million in property, earned-income and service taxes to the municipal pot each year.
Upper Dublin secured a $420,000 federal transportation grant to fund the study in the hope that a revitalized business campus will "financially benefit the township in the long run," said Jules Mermelstein, president of the commissioners.
Township officials said they were only beginning to digest the findings.
"They're proposing some pretty innovative and, in some cases, difficult things to do," said Paul Leonard, the township manager. "It's too early for me to predict how this is going to be received" by the myriad stakeholders, including taxpayers, park property owners, and tenants.
Mermelstein cut straight to the dollar sign: "Anything is possible - if you have enough money to do it."
Removing a mile's worth of concrete from busy Virginia Drive would cost an estimated $550,000. To help ease the pain for the estimated 9,500 drivers who use the road at rush hour, the Temple report suggests creating more links between the turnpike interchange and the office park and widening two-lane Camp Hill Road to four lanes, elevated in high-risk areas.
Still, all of that would be a pittance compared with the expense of buying and razing the floodplain structures. Neither the Temple researchers nor real estate experts would not hazard a guess on that sum last week.
To spare taxpayers and shift the cost, whatever it might be, to the free market, Temple is proposing a complicated and unusual process known as transfer of development rights, or TDR.
Developers or other investors would buy out property owners in the high-risk areas on the park's east side; as part of the transaction, they would be given expanded building rights for available land on the western end. Although the park is generally low-rise, structures could be as tall as six stories in the two proposed TDR "receiving areas" of 40 acres and 94 acres. There, pedestrian-friendly, high-density mixes of residences, stores and offices would be encouraged.
The TDR and the greening of Virginia Drive are not "realistic," said Tony Nichols Jr., vice president of leasing and development for Liberty Property Trust, a major property owner with one million square feet.
About 75 percent of Liberty's real estate is along Virginia Drive - at just about the spot where the road would cease being a road.
Nichols did, however, hail Temple for more accurately defining the park's floodplains. That, he said, would make businesses less reluctant to move in and "give us all a better comfort level." To Montgomery County planner Mike Stokes, the value of the report lies in the clear-as-water lesson that "we just can't tweak our way out of this flooding."
The Fort Washington study was Temple's second major adventure in suburban flood control. Its first subject was the 56-square-mile Pennypack Creek watershed, which is largely in eastern Montgomery County. In the four-year study, begun in 2002, the researchers mapped floodplains with greater accuracy than the Federal Emergency Management Agency - a controversial project documented in a three-part Inquirer series, "A Flood of Trouble," in September 2006.
Temple took on the Fort Washington project intending to go one step further. The team would define the high-risk flood zones in the park - situated in the 13.84-square-mile Sandy Run Creek watershed - and suggest storm-water-management techniques.
Things didn't quite turn out that way. "We were shocked by the volumes [of water] coming out of this watershed," Featherstone said.
The focus quickly shifted to removing development - and the park's workforce - from harm's way.
No one should underestimate the difficulty of turning such a plan into action, said land-use expert Matt McClure, a partner at the Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll L.L.P. law firm. "It is about as complicated as it gets," he said. "And the success or failure of such an effort really depends upon whether you can get all the stakeholders to agree. . . . If there is not a consensus on how to proceed, something like this could be held up at many stages."
To Learn More
A public presentation of the report on the Fort Washington Office Park is scheduled for 7 p.m. Sept. 16 at the Upper Dublin Township Building, 801 Loch Alsh Ave., Fort Washington.
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To read the full report, go to http://go.philly.com/fortwashingtonEndText