Developer Scales Down Grandiose Project For Mount Washington

A map of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with its neighborhoods labeled. For use primarily in the list of Pittsburgh neighborhoods. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Some five years after it was first proposed, a developer is scrapping plans for a grandiose $100 million hotel-condominium project on Mount Washington in favor of a more modest apartment complex.

Gone will be the 20-story high-rise featuring a four- to five-star, 163-room luxury hotel. Gone will be about 58 condos perched on a cliff overlooking Downtown.  Gone, apparently, will be amenities like a scenic overlook and a giant plaza that would have been open to the public.

Instead, Sycamore Grandview Development is proposing to construct about 300 market rate apartments in four buildings wrapped around a “grand central yard” at the four-acre site at the end of Grandview Avenue near the Monongahela Incline.

Developer Beau Beemsterboer is expected to present the revised plans to the community at a meeting Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. at the Mount Washington Senior Center.

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/business/news/developer-scales-down-grandiose-project-for-mount-washington-702313/#ixzz2eDmwdroM

Worldview: How Obama Got Syria So Wrong

English: General Martin E. Dempsey, USA, 18thChairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Unless President Obama can show Congress that his planned Syria strike is linked to a larger – and coherent – strategy, legislators should just say no.

So far, his explanations, and those of his cabinet members at congressional hearings, have only added to the confusion. “What is it you’re seeking?”  Sen. Bob Corker (R., Tenn.) asked Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, in trying to elicit the broader goals of military action.  The general replied candidly,  “I can’t answer that, what we’re seeking.”

That moment of testimony encapsulated the dilemma for the Congress and the country. If the military doesn’t grasp where the commander in chief is leading, and the president can’t (or won’t) clarify, we’re all in trouble.  You can’t get there if you don’t know where “there” is.

This is not the way to wage a war – oops, I mean a limited military strike.

Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/news/nation_world/20130908_Worldview__How_Obama_got_Syria_so_wrong.html#W26XeA2w3ER9tH7q.99

Pottstown Poised To Loosen Tree Rules

Location of Pottstown in Montgomery County (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Editor’s note: What’s that I hear?  Is it the sound of wailing coming from the 200 block of Chestnut Street?  To say the tree ordinance was “a little bit extreme” is the understatement of the decade.

POTTSTOWN — Borough council is expected to vote Monday on a proposal to lessen the requirements for plantingtrees when a property is developed or re-developed.

Specifically, the vote would authorize Borough Solicitor Charles D. Garner Jr. to advertise an amendment to the borough’s sub-division and land development ordinance, known as a SLDO, and would apply to “open space trees” and to “parking lot trees.”

“This is the result of an ongoing theme at the planning commission,” Garner told council during the Wednesday work session.

“We were calculating a large number of trees and then granting waivers and it was becoming problematic,” he said.

Read more: http://www.pottsmerc.com/article/20130906/NEWS01/130909576/pottstown-poised-to-loosen-tree-rules

Healthy Ways To fight Truancy In Reading Aired

Map of Berks County, Pennsylvania, United States Public School Districts (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There are students in the Reading School District who accrue 10 absence excuses from a parent and 40 from doctors in one school year.

So health care officials were urged Friday to be on the lookout for such students and not to feel pressured to issue them absence excuses.

Students are allowed to return to school without such notices, but the absences will be recorded as unexcused, said Anne Fisher, supervisor of the school district’s nurses.

“They don’t need a note to come back,” she said.

Read more: http://readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=509416

Death Leaves BARTA With Big Hole To Fill

English: BARTA bus in downtown Reading, Pennsylvania, July 2007. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

BARTA will send off the first bus from its restored Franklin Street Station in Monday, taking the final step in realizing its dream of reopening the once-abandoned city transportation hub.

But agency officials who have been scrambling to start the new Reading-Lebanon route will have something else on their minds: the man whose vision for the station started it all.

Dennis D. Louwerse, BARTA’s longtime executive director, died Thursday night from complications related to a respiratory infection, according to agency officials.  He was 68.

He took the helm of the then-financially troubled bus agency 30 years ago and transformed it into an organization that’s recognized in the national transportation industry.

Read more: http://readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=509443