Pleasantview Drive Resident Confronts Supervisors in Manor Township

The land that John Simmons discussed with Manor Township supervisors last week lies in the foreground of the picture. The work that has been done on neighboring properties can be seen in the background.

by Nathan Lasher

During a meeting of the Manor Township Supervisors held last Wednesday,  Manor Township resident John “Skip” Simmons raised a concern about the state of a creek that runs through his property as well as a highly-trafficked bridge in his area.

“Over the years, we’ve been having a problem with the siltation of the creek; the Tub Mill Run Watershed Authority Creek,” said Simmons. “About five years ago we had a study, we did a review, and we did work on that creek by opening it back up. We permitted you gentlemen to go in and widen it to let the water flow better, supposedly. In the last couple of years, my property, in particular, has been sliding in and closing off the stream totally. I can cut my grass in the creek with a foot-and-a-half of mud above the creek bed. It’s eating my property away.”

According to Simmons, three years ago, two of his neighbors whose properties through which the creek also runs, had a grant given to them to have their portions of the creek redone a second time. This time, they were given new wing walls, end walls, and rip rap to keep their land from sliding.

“I was the originator of the cleaning out of the stream to begin with, and I am left with absolutely nothing,” said Simmons. “I have solid mud and muck in the creek that crosses 2213 Pleasantview Drive. If anything happens with another hurricane or something, that water is going to rise so quick, there’s nowhere for it to go, that it’s going to come through their channel, it will go through their bridges. Their bridges should have been widened to begin with anyway. Whoever did this project did not look into it deep enough to figure out what was going to happen to the Simmons property. The Simmons property has totally collapsed.”

Simmons went on to say that because his land has collapsed into the stream, the water is sealed off and will back up into the other properties in the event of bad weather. “It needs to be widened, it needs to be looked at by an engineer, and I wish Mike Malak would talk to his engineers again, come back in, have another review of it, check with the Conservation Authority, and find out why my piece of property was thought to be no problem. Yet, as we look at its final end you will find that my property is the main problem. That water isn’t going anywhere,” he said.

The next problem that Simmons brought up had to do with the bridge that allows the creek to flow underneath Pleasantview Drive. “It’s a ten-foot-long bridge, it’s cracking, the underbelly is full of nothing but debris, and I have pictures right here that I’m going to give to the Board for you ladies and gentlemen to review,” said Simmons. “You will see how bad this bridge is. We have the Marcellus people coming across it, and one day I went up to the top of St. Mary’s ninety-degree turn up there, a truck was hung up, and I asked the foreman, who was trying to get that truck off of the road, ‘how much do these trucks weigh,’ and he said, ‘that guy’s coming in at 100,000 pounds.’ That’s 50 tons. What can that ten-foot-long bridge take? You have Armstrong County School District running that every day. You have all of the parents taking their kids there. We have trucks going back and forth for the Marcellus thing right now. And, I understand that it’s unlimited. There is no set tonnage on that bridge. Yet, the bridge continues to fracture. Nobody ever gets down there to look at it. I mean you have your bridge people, and if you hire Senate Engineering or PennDOT to go down and look at that, I understand it’s not PennDOT’s problem, anything over 20 feet would be their problem, but you’ve got to look at it. It’s falling apart. We’ve got 1,000 trucks that have come through there this past year-and-a-half, and there hasn’t been anything done on Pleasantview Drive.”

Simmons explained that he wished to get in touch with Mark Critz in order to get stimulus money for a new bridge and to clean out the creek. However, he said that he would not allow just anyone on his property. “I will not let anybody on my property because of one thing,” he said. “It has slid already one time. It will slide again if you guys get in it and try to muck it out. You’re just going to make my opening come back and slide back in unless I get it rip rapped.”

Senate Engineering’s Mike Malak offered some history on that particular project. “First of all, I was not involved,” said Malak. “Senate was involved with the first part of the project which was a DEP project through, I believe, Growing Greener. It was a bank stabilization project. The only thing they could do was use rip rap. That was the criteria that DEP said. It’s a rip rap only project. There was small rip rap placed in and you had Gabion Baskets.”

“That’s all we have,” replied Simmons. “You gave me a basket for my whole property line, and seventy feet of my property is sliding in. What good is the Gabion Basket doing?”

Malak went on to explain that once the original bank stabilization project was done, DEP inspected the area and found that the banks belonging to Simmons’s neighbors had failed. “They didn’t have a problem with your property,” said Malak. “They said the Gabions were in place, which were done on the original project. They said your neighbors’ property was filling in. It was too steep. So, they had to come up with a solution. There’s a grant out there that will pay to fix prior projects that have failed funded under DEP. That’s what we did. It was approved, and they put it in. It wasn’t the township’s decision. It wasn’t our decision. It was DEP’s decision because it was their money.”

“I don’t know why they figured that I was not in peril,” said Simmons. “Look at it now. I am preventing these guys, right now, from having flow through the property. If we get a hurricane again like we did two or three times in the last five years, that creek is going to shut off. We need to open it up, and we need a new bridge.”

At the end of the conversation, Malak suggested that Simmons contact the DEP and raise a concern. “They’ll come out and look at it again, and if they feel you have a legitimate argument, then they’ll come back to the township,” he said.

Simmons brought up issues with the stability of a bridge on Pleasantview Drive as well as the debris underneath it during Wednesday's meeting of the Manor Township Supervisors.