Seven-Lot Subdivision Would Finish Raven's Claw

Photos by Evan Brandt

GETTING AN EARLY START: Liam Kaufman, who attends Spring-Ford Area School District's 9th Grade Center, was unanimously appointed by the township supervisors board as a student member of the Limerick Parks and Recreation Committee. The past two years he has volunteered as a counselor-in-training at the township summer camp= and will start as a full-fledged counselor this summer.

The majority of Tuesday's Limerick Supervisors meeting was taken up with discussion of a seven-lot subdivision being built on Masters Drive in the Raven's Claw development, which has 193 homes already built.

The parcel was originally planned as a health club when the project was approved, but that was never built. The only other use the zoning allowed was a church, which no one seemed to want Sunday traffic-wise.

Mercury File Photo

Limerick had to go to court to get the Raven's Claw project finished.

Raven's Claw is a development merged with the Raven's Claw golf course and was begun around 2000, but the developer, Dewey Homes, never completely finished the neighborhood, leaving all of the neighborhood’s roads and some of the planned sidewalks unfinished.

Additionally, some whose driveways were scheduled to be paved by the developer were left high and dry.

The roads in the neighborhood were left with many potholes and cracks with manholes raising up out of the road in multiple areas.

In July, 2013, a court order was issued to Dewey to make the improvements in the neighborhood. In January this year, a judge denied the township’s motion for contempt filed against Dewey since they did not make progress on the work.

In April, 2014, the township successfully pushed for a contempt order and finished the paving and sidewalks that were left unfinished.

The site plan for the seven-lot sub-division in Raven's Claw.

The seven-lot subdivision project received a variance from the zoning hearing board to allow the homes to be built, and did so without any objection from the township supervisors.
But Supervisors Chairman Ken Sperring was irritated that the lack of objections from the supervisors was based on a promise to get support for the sub-division from a majority of the members of the Homeowners Association, or HOA.

Rob Lewis, a former resident and the attorney for the Homeowner's Association, said the HOA board endorsed the project, but getting agreement from 90 households was not something he was ever told was required.

He said the restrictions for the new homes would be posted on the HOA website and added to the annual HOA general meeting scheduled for March 20, which Sperring and the other board members decided was adequate enough.

The design for the new homes will be similar to those in Raven's Claw.

Approval of the plan, which  Sperring said "is clean. We just want to make sure the people already living there are OK with this," was tabled until the supervisor's first meetying in June, after the annual HOA meeting.

The supervisors voted unanimously to extend the deadline for preliminary/final site plan approval to July 22.

Lewis said the new homes would controlled by deed restriction with rules nearly identical to those imposed on the homes already built in Raven's Claw. However, the new homes cannot be added to the HOA because it would require 100 percent approval from every member and "getting 196 households to participate and agree is nearly impossible."

So after being vacant for 14 years, the parcel will be developed with seven more homes similar in style.

And with that, here are the Tweets from the meeting:

Within the Raven's Claw