BY SUSAN BRYANT

sbryant@tnonline.com

Heidelberg Supervisor and Director of Public Works David Fink began the discussion of a new public works building during the board’s Jan. 16 meeting.

Fink said he and Supervisors Steve Bachman and Jonathan Jakum met with a Geoff Dean of Keystone Consulting Engineers, and Road Superintendent Kevin Huber about doing a survey and marking the boundaries, especially at the street and in the field, to look at the possibility of erecting a garage to store the township’s equipment.

“The reason for looking at that area is because the area is most handy, but it is undetermined whether or not it’s in a floodplain,” Fink said. “The cost of doing the survey is next to prohibited so we are actively looking at the area which is just a couple 100 feet down the street and there was a request to look at how many vehicles and things that we could store in a structure.

“I don’t know if you saw I did a rough outline for a 68-foot by 50-foot building.

“We could store three plows, the two mowers, the two 10-wheel dump trucks, the loader and the grater in that structure and there’s still a little space for other things with two 16-foot by 14-foot doors.”

Fink said that would meet the township’s zoning requirements and they would not have to do anything special.

“This would actually empty out two bays of the existing garage which will give us a lot more room to operate,” Fink said. “It would also take some equipment out of the potato cellar, not a whole lot of equipment.

“I was amazed at all the items that are stored in that garage but it would add quite a bit of space and in the potato cellar.”

After a discussion between Fink and Bachman on the washer system, the building being heated and the size of it, Township Manager Dawn Didra suggested Keystone Consulting Engineers do a feasibility study on what they need and what would fit there.

“It would pay us to have something sized specifically for us because then we could get the grant money for exactly what we need,” she said.

“We still need to plan ahead and make sure we have what we need.

“If we had another building that was big enough for all of our stuff, then the Council of Governments could rent or buy the potato cellar and then we wouldn’t have to do it by ourselves.

Bachman said the building is way too small and he would rather like to see if they can get grant money to build a bigger building.

Dean offered his comments.

“I was going to talk about this a little bit later when you got to me but we’re going to survey the property first,” Dean stated. “It’s going to take about two weeks to have the survey mapped out and an actual plan that we can work with.

“Then from there, we can do a couple of sketch plans to give you.

“First of all, identify how much space there is to allow us to put up a building, the biggest possible building and then we can work down from there.

“Once we know where the setbacks are, where the slopes are and floodplain and all of that stuff we can work with you and put together a couple of sketch plans and hopefully you’ll be happy with the size of the building and you can use that as an exhibit or an attachment for a potential grant application. “