LEXINGTON — Discussions surrounding the potential new gas station on the Lexington square heated up Wednesday night.
The Village of Lexington’s Planning Commission met at the senior center for a formal hearing with representatives of Englefield Oil. A court stenographer was onsite transcribing the proceedings.
Village administrator Andy Smallstey told Richland Source both sides had agreed to the hearing format and that the village wanted a record.
The majority of the discussion centered around a traffic study commissioned by Englefield and called into question by an independent consultant hired by the village.
Last year, Heath-based company Englefield Oil applied for zoning permits to construct a gas station and convenience store at 15 East Main Street, the former site of the Lexington Plaza.
The village planning commission granted Englefield a conditional permitted use certificate last September. In January, the commission voted to recommend council approve Englefield’s request.
A few weeks later, a motion to approve the zoning request died in village council for lack of a second. Council later sent the request back to planning commission for further review.
Council later voted to send the application back to the planning commission for further review.
“Part of what planning commission does is to dig down into those details,” Mayor Brian White said. “It’s so critical with traffic at this site that (council) wanted more review and more discussion.”
During the hearing, attorney Mike Whitehead called various witnesses in support of Englefield’s application. Those witnesses were also cross-examined by members of the planning commission and John Studenmund, the village’s law director.
Jon Gordon, Vice President of Construction for Englefield Oil, said the company made numerous concessions at the request of the village. Some were simple aesthetic changes, such as swapping out a board and batten exterior for brick, and changing the color of the canopy above the gas pumps. Others involved minor adjustments to address stormwater concerns.
“We want to be part of your community,” Gordon said. “We are good stewards throughout Ohio. We give back to the community, we’re looking at giving jobs to the community, tax base to the community.
“We’re just here because we want to be here. That’s all we’re asking.”
Englefield also commissioned a traffic study as requested by the planning commission, even choosing the engineering firm recommended by the village engineer.
That traffic study, performed by TMS Engineers Inc. of Twinsburg, did not indicate the construction of a gas station would have a negative impact on traffic flow. However, it stipulated there should be no left turns into the development from Main Street unless a left turn lane was added.
Studenmund asked numerous questions about the methodology behind the study, citing comments from a second engineering firm in Columbus.
Earlier this year, the village hired Burgess & Niple to review the TMS traffic study.
According to a memorandum from B&N, the firm provided eight “review comments” to TMS in March. Engineers Randy Kill and Kendra Schenk wrote in the memo that TMS provided a revised traffic study in response, but only two of the concerns were addressed.
Michael Schweickart, a traffic operations engineer and owner of TMS Engineers Inc. in Twinsburg, attended the meeting. He told planning commission members the company followed the standards outlined by the Ohio Department of Transportation. He also said his opinion on the report has not changed as a result of the B&N memo.
Schenk said she didn’t doubt that TMS followed ODOT procedures.
“We have additional comments based on the assumptions that were made that are the gray area within the ODOT procedures,” she said.
Those comments touched on TMS’s traffic counts, trip generation metrics and assessment of future traffic growth.
B&N recommended TMS conduct a new traffic count on the square because its original count was conducted on Sept. 21, a day when Lexington Local Schools closed due to a staffing shortage.
Schweickart said the traffic count is just one factor in its calculations.
“We believe we’ve captured the traffic flow characteristics of Main Street,” he said.
“Once we start to apply all these other factors, it takes into account for the entire year and gets the volume that we’re going to analyze.”
He told planning commission members that the “raw data” from a single day traffic count is not directly included in the calculations and would not impact projections.
Rather, the Ohio Department of Transportation recommends using a “design hour factor” and peak traffic hour calculations. This data comes from permanent count stations, which ODOT has installed throughout the state.
Schweickart said his firm used data from a station on Main Street just west of Frederick Street.
He also noted TMS assumed a positive growth rate in traffic, despite data from ODOT showing slowed growth.
“Growth in the study area was found to be declining based upon historical data from the Ohio Department of Transportation,” Schweickart wrote in a memo to Whitehead. “Regardless, a positive growth rate of 0.25% per year was applied to the counts.”
B&N also stated TMS didn’t take into account how the new, consolidated elementary school the district plans to build near the existing Central Elementary building will impact future traffic volumes.
“We did not do anything with that,” Schweickart confirmed. “If the school was required to do an impact study, we would need their forecasts to be able to do any calculation.”
Schweickart said he requested crash records from the Department of Public Safety regarding driveways along Main Street and did not find reports of a single motor vehicle crash involving a left turn in the vicinity of the proposed development during the last three years of available data.
Studenmund challenged that assertion. He told Schweickart that there have already been three accidents involving left turns on East Main Street this year, citing reports from the Lexington Police Department.
“These dates are Feb. 11 of this year, May 18 of this year and May 19 of this year, all involving left turns on East Main Street in this vicinity here,” Studenmund said. “This is information you could have obtained, but you chose not to, correct?”
Schweickart responded that he had not had time to request records from the local police.
Studenmund also asked Schweickart about the company’s choice to use trip generation projections based on the proposed square footage of the station’s convenience store, rather than the number of gas pumps.
The B&N memo recommended using the number of vehicle refueling stations as an independent variable instead “to be a little more conservative.”
Schweickart said that best practices in the industry required choosing a value with the most studies to support projections. He claimed there were at least twice as many studies in support of using the square footage metric.
Studenmund pointed out the projection for the number of vehicles entering the development was lower using the square footage metric than it would have been using the pump metric.
The final witness called was Andy Meade, the current owner of 15 East Main Street.
Meade expressed frustration with the proceedings, accusing the village of being disrespectful towards Englefield.
“Why are we here? We did everything that was asked and took a unanimous vote to council,” he said. “These folks have gone above and beyond and have been belittled by every spectator, every Facebook person in this community. And what they’re trying to do is bring a legitimate business which creates revenue for this village.
“They’ve put up with a lot of B.S.”
Mayor Brian White later said both the village and Englefield had been professional and that the parties had worked closely together to resolve their differences.
“I think everybody wants to move forward one way or another,” he said. “That site is in the middle of downtown and it’s not going anywhere right now, so we do need to move that along.”
The village planning commission will call its own witnesses during a second hearing, currently scheduled for June 23. Members of the public will be allowed to comment during that meeting.
