YORK COUNTY, Pa. — At the start of the school year, the Dallastown Area School District approved a secondary driveway for one of its elementary schools. The driveway would connect a quiet residential road to the school.
Now, following a months-long driveway dispute, residents in York Township feel powerless in their own homes after an appeal to stop the public from using the road was denied by the township’s zoning board tonight.
Jerry Smith has spent 20 years in his home on Merrin Road, but now he’s fighting to protect the peace he has become accustomed to.
“If it wasn’t for my wife and myself actually going and getting an attorney it would be done with no consideration for other people on the street at all,” Smith said.
The decision to turn his road into a second driveway for the elementary school came without question- but left Smith and his neighbors with many.
“How am I going to get out of my driveway and navigate the road if I have 50 cars coming up through going to the school?” Smith asked.
Community concerns for the project include residents' ability to access their property and the blind corners on Merrin Road creating dangerous situations for drivers and pedestrians.
The school district agrees, stating its top concern is safety, and the driveway is another way of achieving that. Pennsylvania requires schools to have two exit points in the event of an emergency. And with the increase in school shootings over the last decade at the forefront of school safety concerns, officials say the Merrin Road construction is necessary.
But Merrin Road residents say that’s not the problem.
“If they need to use our road for emergency egress please, go ahead, get all the children out. But they added the caveat on there that we’re going to also use this for our car-rider traffic and that’s what we are not okay with,” Smith explained.
Instead, residents hope to see roadway improvements like adding sidewalks and expanding Merrin Road to accommodate the increased traffic. Which is why Smith decided to take on the school district and York Township.
“Oh yeah we’ve spent thousands of dollars,” he said.
Smith said to fight the decision he had to hire legal representation but ran into some roadblocks due to conflicts of interest.
“What we found was all the attorneys work for the Dallastown School District, so there’s a conflict of interest. Nobody wanted to take the case because it's very hard to fight the township and the school district because they’re very powerful.”
After finding legal counsel to represent him, Smith hit another bump in the road. Since the school district only proposed a new driveway, they were not required to conduct a traffic study as it does not interfere with any major roadways.
But Smith argues that the addition of 40 to 50 cars to Merrin Road every day during heavy traffic periods should have prompted the district to take those additional steps. That's why he hired a contractor to conduct a traffic study and survey Merrin Road. Smith said he called various contractors but ended up with one from Maryland due to conflicts of interest in the township. That study was presented to the zoning board at the Sept. 24 meeting.
However, even with the information, York Township zoning board members denied Smith’s appeal fighting the secondary driveway for York Township Elementary at the Oct. 22 meeting.
The driveway has already been paved and painted and is ready for use, but an official public use start date has not been announced.
Smith says he’s not giving up. He’s already thinking of the next steps to protect his street.
“We’ll have to see if we can afford to appeal to a higher court,” he stated.