Community members and institutional leaders discuss planning priorities at last week's meeting on the Upper Northwest Plan.

by Brendan Sample

With the deadline for public comments on the Upper Northwest Draft Plan approaching, leaders of several Chestnut Hill organizations presented their top recommendations to approximately 30 local residents in attendance at an August 8 meeting at Chestnut Hill Hospital. Those organizations – the Chestnut Hill Community Association, Business District and Conservancy – were represented by Celeste Hardester, Richard Snowden, John Landis, Larry McEwen, Lori Salganicoff, Philip Dawson, Joyce Lenhardt and Anne McNiff, who collectively led the meeting.

Each of the three organizations presented their top five draft priority recommendations. The representatives acknowledged that they had more beyond those, but wanted to keep the discussion focused on the most important priorities.

The hope was to come up with a list of five combined priorities shared by all three organizations.. Some of the common themes of those initial 15 were: limiting the subdivision of lots, the creation of a Neighborhood Conservation Overlay zone to further encourage careful development and up-zoning select properties in the region to CMX-2 and 2.5 status.

While acknowledging that Chestnut Hill certainly did not have the same needs as other parts of the city, representatives of the neighborhood institutions said it was still important to work to make things better.

“Things are pretty good in Chestnut Hill, but there are some things that could use improvement as far as certain quality of life issues,” Landis said.

The current deadline to submit public comments on the Plan is September 4. Salganicoff said that she and the other community leaders have asked the city to push that date back by another month to give more time to those who may be on vacation for the summer. They were still waiting on a response at the time of the meeting, and so they continued to work under the assumption that the deadline would stay as it is.

Residential response was not overly critical of the proposed recommendations, with most simply wanting to clarify certain details of the proposals. There was some concern expressed over the number of recommendations presented at the meeting, as presenting 15 or more to the city could give off a sense of Chestnut Hill not knowing what it really wants. Though the community leaders did agree that too many recommendations would not look good on their end, they reassured everyone that these lists would be further condensed in the coming weeks.

“Despite having some slightly different priorities, we believe that the three organizations will still be able to come together on a united effort,” Snowden said.

The proposed recommendations are still in a draft phase, as they will need to receive further input from the CHCA Board of Directors before being submitted to the city for consideration into what will be the finished Upper Northwest Plan. The Board will meet next on August 23 to discuss the specifics of the proposals and vote on a potential approval.

Residents looking to submit comments on the Plan can continue to email them to Community Planner Ian Hegarty until September 4, as well as to Salganicoff, Dawson or McNiff directly.

• Ian Hegarty: ian.hegarty@phila.gov
• Lori Salganicoff: lori@chconservancy.org
• Phil Dawson: pdawson@chestnuthillpa.com
• Anne McNiff: anne@chestnuthill.org

Brendan Sample can be reached at brendan@chestnuthilllocal.com