Jul 13, 2022 2 min read

Peters Township council declined an offer to buy a piece of undeveloped municipal property.

Council members were presented with the offer to purchase about four acres of land at 901 Old Washington Road at their meeting Monday night.

The potential buyer and amount were not disclosed.

Township Manager Paul Lauer explained that the lot was donated to the township in 1959.

“The one thing about it, it’s a very difficult piece of property,” Lauer said.

The land is a forested area that separates Old Washington Road from Route 19.

If the township sold the property, it would be zoned for residential development.

“It’s a nice buffer between Old Washington and the commercial district,” said council Vice Chair Frank Kosir Jr.

The board voted 5-1 to reject the offer. Frank Arcuri voted in favor, while Matt Rost was absent from the meeting.

Arcuri said during the meeting that he felt the township would benefit from allowing someone to develop the lot.

“This is just a piece of ground that we own, and it could be developed and we could get taxes out of it. I think that’s a benefit,” Arcuri said.

Also at Monday’s meeting, council discussed the looming expense of repairing erosion problems at Peters Lake dam spillway. Last year, new standards for handling excessive precipitation were issued by the state Department of Environmental Protection.

Per the DEP, the spillway must be able to handle 17.5 inches of depth for two hours of precipitation. The estimated cost to accomplish that is about $5 million.

“One of the things that council did was to appropriate funds for a study to be done for alternatives for addressing the efficiency of the spillway. That report is complete … and it provides for a number of different alternatives. That report has been submitted to the DEP and the DEP is going to be working with us to tell us what it is we need to do to bring the dam into compliance,” Lauer said.