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Cranberry commits funds to flood study

CRANBERRY TWP — Yet another community will help push forward an effort to stem the tide of flooding in the county’s southwest tier.

Cranberry Township supervisors on Thursday committed $2,000 toward a study examining how best to implement changes aimed at keeping flooding to a minimum.

In doing so, Cranberry joins a growing list of municipalities taking this next step, after 10 communities and Butler County commissioned a study examining the problem areas for stormwater in the southern section of the county.

Cranberry’s contribution, along with those other municipalities originally part of the group in the Lower Connoquenessing watershed, will help fund another study as to the best ways to move forward with the recommendations on how to stem flooding provided by Herbert, Rowland & Grubic, an engineering firm which performed the original examination.

In addition to Cranberry, the group includes Adams, Forward, Jackson, Lancaster and Penn townships, as well as Evans City, Harmony, Seven Fields and Zelienople.

On the table for ways to implement the suggestions are formal and informal methods, such as an authority, which could impose a minimal stormwater fee on landowners, or a joint-purchasing agreement, through which the municipalities could agree to jointly finance the stormwater projects, among other methods.

Dan Santoro, Cranberry township manager, said Thursday this is another step forward with cutting back on how much physical and economic damage comes after heavy rains.

“The first step was the creation of that report ... the next is about, how do we advance those projects that were advised, cooperatively, with the 10 municipalities?” Santoro said.

In Cranberry, the engineering firm examined three “problem areas” identified by the township: stormwater detention in the Fox Run neighborhood, a deteriorating culvert in the Pinehurst development and ways to complete detention basin modifications in the St. Leonard Woods neighborhood.

Although each municipality and the county were provided with three potential projects — except for Harmony, which had two, and Jackson, which had four — Cranberry’s will likely be lower on the priority list for a cooperative attempt to implement the changes.

Mark Gordon, the county’s chief of economic development, said in February that the group, in a cooperative effort, would more than likely try to address high-priority issues first, with the earliest projects probably being upstream in the watershed.

While Zelienople also adopted a new ordinance for how stormwater must be managed in newly developed properties — it restricts the amount of runoff from those properties to be less than it was prior to development — Cranberry did not, as it currently has a more restrictive limit on runoff.

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