Council tables bid for stormwater ‘bumpouts’ after hours of public comment

Narberth Borough Council on June 18 delayed formal advertisement of a stormwater construction bid after residents packed the meeting to press the borough for more transparency and alternatives. Neighbors in North Narberth, especially occupants of Windendell Road, said they were blindsided by the latest plan and asked the borough to reconsider site choices that would place two bumpouts on one low-volume street.

The bumpouts are a street-level best-practice included in Narberth’s state-required Pollutant Reduction Plan (PRP). Council members and staff said the borough submitted the PRP to the state in 2020 and secured permit approval in 2021; engineering work converts each proposed location’s drainage area into a sediment-reduction credit that the state accepts as progress on the permit. Tony Catalosi, the borough engineer, said the calculation starts from a drainage-area footprint (which includes adjacent land, not only pavement) and is converted to pounds-per-year of sediment reduced; the state reviews and validates credits annually.

But residents raised a long list of objections at public comment. Larry Sykes described months of construction safety problems and blocked handicap ramps on his block and asked why the borough had not enforced contractors; several speakers — including Jack Brinkman, Evan McCassy and Amaya Macy — said residents were never shown the methodology used to allocate bumpouts across streets and argued the current Windendell configuration would take up an entire house frontage and remove parking relied on by families. Other commenters cited concerns about pedestrian safety, driveway access, property values, inconsistent street-width measurements (24 feet pavement vs. 50-foot right-of-way listed on plans) and whether lower-traffic streets yield the same sediment capture benefits as busier corridors.

Responding to the comments, Catalosi said the Drainage-area-based calculations he and his firm use do not change with traffic volume — the state’s crediting approach treats drainage area as the determinant — and that earlier bumpouts in town have not been associated with reported safety incidents. Council members repeatedly said they heard residents’ concerns and asked staff to produce a short list of alternative placements that would not occupy an entire frontage and that preserve at least a minimum linear frontage for parking. Councilmember Joe (last name not specified on the transcript) proposed a pragmatic rule — disqualify candidate bumpout sites that would remove more than a set percentage of a property’s frontage (a staff-proposed 20 linear feet minimum was discussed) — and requested that the borough engineer run credits for those alternative locations and present results to the Infrastructure Committee prior to reopening the bid process.

Faced with the volume of citizen objections, a motion to table the agenda item to allow further study was seconded and approved. The motion to table (item 10A) was put to council and carried; the transcript records the tabling vote but no roll-call tally was read aloud during the meeting. Council members said tabling would allow them to solicit alternative layouts from engineers and reconcile siting decisions with residents’ concerns before the borough proceeds to advertise a construction bid.