Wayne County planner focuses on growth

By TOM KANE

HONESDALE — Ed Coar, the Wayne County Director of Planning, is a man who lives every day with growth and the issues around growth.

“The aim of any planning function in a municipality is to manage growth,” Coar said. “It’s not supposed to discourage growth or try to stop it. So that as growth and change happens, it’s important that it be done in the least disruptive manner,” he explained.

While zoning, which is the principal method a community uses to manage growth, is the domain of the local municipality, the townships and boroughs of the county, a county official like Coar will be deeply enmeshed indirectly in zoning issues.

In Wayne recently, several new growth projects have received a large amount of resistance in local communities. These involve two proposed quarries, in Palmyra and Lebanon Townships, the new federal prison in Waymart and a proposed wind farm in Clinton.

Local opponents of the quarries in Palmyra and Lebanon have an uphill battle, according to Coar, since there is a provision in the PA Municipal Planning Code that says a municipality “shall provide for the reasonable development of mineral rights.” The code defines minerals as limestone, dolomite, sand and gravel, rock and stone, earth, fill, iron ore, zinc ore, vermiculite and clay and others.

A wind farm is a group of large windmill structures, some of them 300 feet high, which generate electricity. There is a plan to erect over 20 of them atop Moosic Mountain in the Township of Clinton. Clinton has no zoning. The state code, again, encourages municipalities to support renewable sources of energy, Coar said.

According to the Wayne Independent of February 12, opponents question whether the project’s contractor has the proper permission from the landowners and whether the project would harm endangered species of birds that use the area when they migrate.

The new prison project, which has been in public discussion since 1997, will begin with a groundbreaking this spring despite some local opposition.

“We have explored every issue and addressed every concern in the community and are now ready to go,” said Federal Bureau of Prison’s spokesman David Dorworth. Since the prison will be built on state land belonging to Waymart State Prison, no permits were required.

On the issue of local growth, Coar said, “What do you do when an applicant has a ten-lot subdivision with correct lot sizes, and they meet all the regulations? You can’t just say, ‘We’ve seen enough growth. We’re going to deny that application.’”

That amounts to a taking on a constitutional issue, he said. “What a government would be saying is ‘We’re not going to allow you to benefit from all the property rights that you have.’

“Elected officials and planning officials do not have absolute power to say, ‘You can do this but you can’t do that,’ “ he said. “Subdivision regulations and zoning regulations guide how that municipality is going to function.”

Coar expressed his opinion that many people resist growth because they resist change of any kind. “You can’t stop growth, you can’t stop change,” Coar said. “The best thing you can do is manage it.”