Pottstown Talks Potholes, Pavement and a Plan for a $1.7M Children's Discovery Center on High Street

Two major items of interest were unveiled at last night's borough council meeting, one thing that is hard to hate, and one that we all love to hate.

The first is the proposed Pottstown Children's Discovery Center, a kind of "Please-Touch-Museum" and learning center planned for High Street.

The other is potholes and paving. We all hate potholes and we all love to complain about paving, or, more specifically, it's absence.

Pottstown Children's Discovery Center

Three organizers, Beth Desch, Karen Hudson and Jennifer Brown spoke to council and outlined their
vision for the non-profit center.

There is nothing similar to what they have planned in the area and their research indicates there are more than 575,000 children living within 50 miles of Pottstown.

They also found that 36 percent of Pottstown children live at or below the poverty line, so the admission price of $8 to $12 could be reduced, or free, for those from low-income families.

The organizers want the Pottstown Children's Discovery Center to be on High Street and even have a building picked out, but until they can raise the $1.7 million they estimate will be needed to buy the building and refurbish it to get things started.

They are hoping to do that by 2021 and make it a "Certified Autism Center" because Montgomery County has the most autism diagnosis in Pennsylvania after Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

The idea is for the center to be interactive, and to support the efforts of the Pottstown School District, said Desch. She said after speaking with Barth Elementary School Principal Ryan Oxenford, the group hopes to put together a kind of traveling STEM exhibit that "brings the field trip to the kids."

In the meantime, they have been raising awareness with events, their own and attending others.

Perhaps the largest to date was the "Noon Year's Eve," an event held at the Carousel at Pottstown and designed to give kids a New Year's Eve experience without losing sleep.

"We did a countdown and released balloons, the kids loved it," said Desch, who added it attracted 150 children.

Pottstown Paving Plan

It's not hard to find places along the 60 miles of roadway the borough must maintain to find places

From left, Pottstown Public Works Director Doug Yerger,

Borough Manager Justin Keller and Council VP Carol Kulp.

that need some work, particularly at this time of the year.

Potholes and cracked pavement prevail.

So Council Vice President Carol Kulp, who also heads up council's Infrastructure Committee, thought it might be a good idea to outline Pottstown's limited resources, and the way in which they will be used to keep our fillings in our teeth.

The primary source of funding for roadwork in Pottstown is the liquid fuels fund, the borough's share of revenue from Pennsylvania's fuel tax.

This year it will work out to about $930,000. That might sound like a lot until you realize that is costs about $250,000 to pave one mile of roadway, said Borough Manager Justin Keller.

That money will help pave about $3.7 miles of road in 2019, said Public Works Director Doug Yerger.

Examples of the five different kind of ratings Doug Yerger uses to

prioritize road repairs in Pottstown.

Another way roads get paved is when the Pottstown Borough Authority, or PECO, digs up a road to replace a water, sewer or gas pipe. When those planned projects are added in, the total amount of roadway being planned for paving this year rises to 5.05 miles.

As for fixing potholes, the borough budget only allocates about $25,000 a year for that task.

As for the paving, those decisions are made by the interaction of the condition of the roadway, and the plans by the utilities.

Yerger has a five-point scale he uses to classify borough streets and which need the most work, with five being the worst.

But that is not always the deciding factor.

The roads scheduled to be repaved in Pottstown this year.

So, for example, Keller said a road that is rated as a five, the worst, may not be paved one year while a four or a three is. That is often because utilities in the ground are being replaced and the paving follows that work.

This year, .61 miles of road will be paved as the result of a sewer pipe project and another .63 miles will be paved as the result of a water line project. No word yet on how much PECO will dig up, or the state will pave as several major roadways in town are PennDOT's responsibility.

The borough is experimenting with using "millings" to pave alleys.

"We don't want to pave a road and dig it up two years later to replace a sewer line," Keller explained. "It's a constant game of chasing your tail, and we try to stay on top of it."

Unfortunately, more than 14 miles of roadway in Pottstown are classified as fives under Yerger's
system. Obviously, this means that whatever gets paved, some of the worst roads in town will remain crappy.

Now let's move on to everyone's second most popular complaint (bike lanes don't count. They're a whole separate level of irritation). I'm talking of course about Pottstown's alleys.

Yerger said that many of the alleys are not ordained, making it more difficult, legally and practically, to spend taxpayer money fixing them up. Even the ordained alleys rank lower than the more traveled streets.

But don't despair alley dwellers. Yerger said the borough is currently piloting two different less

Aggregate is being tested on an alley off Airy Street.

expensive ways of treating alleys.

One is to use left-over millings scraped off roads before they are re-paved. The borough has put millings down, and pressed them, on two alleys as an experiment and after a year, "they are holding up very well."

Another method is using a substance called "aggregate," which has no binding oil or tar to hold it together. Pottstown has received a $230,000 grant from the Montgomery County Conservation District to use this on an alley off Airy Street as a way to fight water pollution.

The benefit of using this material is it is less expensive than paving, and using it helps the borough to meet more stringent federal Clean Water Act regulations, Yerger explained.

There was certainly more discussed last night, but it's late and I am running out of steam.

Darlene Bainbridge addresses violence in Pottstown.

But before I go, allow me to observe that after all the sound and fury on Facebook about the situation at Pottstown Middle School; the hand-wringing about the shooting death at York and Walnut streets; after all the righteous indignation, and pronunciations, exactly one person showed up at council to address it.

The only person to step away from the keyboard and show up to stand up was lifetime resident Darlene Bainbridge.

Bainbridge volunteers all over the place and is involved with a number of positive initiatives in the borough.

She said people are advising her to move out of Pottstown, that it is "irresponsible to raise your kids here," but she rejects that.

Bainbridge also said council and the police department need to offer some guidance to help Pottstown deal with what she described as an "out-of-town element" causing problems here.

She also observed with some evident disappointment, "I thought there would be more people here to speak."

Unfortunately, she stood alone and council had no response.

With that, here is the mayor's report:



And as if that wasn't super-cool enough, here is the borough manager's report:




And of course, what kind of blogger would I be without presenting you with the Tweets from last night's meeting? Here they are:

Of Potholes and Children's Museums