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Chester County developer mindful of conservation

Developer Brian O'Neill is a saltwater fisherman. But he's had a crash course in freshwater-creek management, courtesy of Chester County fishing activists and planners, since planning the Uptown Worthington mixed-use development at the former National Rolling Mills in Frazer.

O'Neill Properties, a developer with a green reputation, is restoring Little Valley Creek and building flood controls and irrigation systems at its mixed-use project at a former steel mill in Frazer.
O'Neill Properties, a developer with a green reputation, is restoring Little Valley Creek and building flood controls and irrigation systems at its mixed-use project at a former steel mill in Frazer.Read moreED HILLE / Inquirer Staff Photographer

Developer Brian O'Neill is a saltwater fisherman. But he's had a crash course in freshwater-creek management, courtesy of Chester County fishing activists and planners, since planning the Uptown Worthington mixed-use development at the former National Rolling Mills in Frazer.

"Fish are like you and me. They want to be comfortable, right?" said the owner of O'Neill Properties Group L.P., of King of Prussia, swirling mud off his shoes in a puddle amid the plowed hillside where he sees stores, homes, hotels and offices rising on 96 acres over the next two years.

So O'Neill said he understood when Chester County officials and the local chapter of the anglers' group Trout Unlimited raised red flags about his original 2006 proposal for draining Uptown Worthington through a branch of Valley Creek, which flows south into the Schuylkill at Valley Forge Park.

Surrounded by industry and new offices and subdivisions, Valley Creek is still what state officials call an "exceptional value" creek and a Class A trout stream. The Little Valley Creek branch that drains Worthington, below the old mill site, is home to native wild brown trout, not the muddy-tasting foreign rainbows that are artificially stocked in lesser East Coast streams.

O'Neill's gotten rich by cultivating a green reputation, turning "brownfields" at former industrial sites up and down the East Coast into tax-paying, high-rent office and housing developments.

As a first step in restoring the creek on his latest brownfield, O'Neill planned to "daylight" a 1,000-foot section of Little Valley Creek by freeing it from the pipe that carried it under the mill for 50 years.

"Not much life exists in a cave," said Pete Goodman, president of the local chapter of Trout Unlimited.

But freeing the stream did not erase the fact that O'Neill's planned mini-town would pave over even more space than the former rolling mill, Chester County conservation and planning officials wrote in letters to their East Whiteland Township counterparts.

"What's really tearing the creek apart is the storm water," Goodman said. "Just the removal of the pipe didn't make us happy."

The planners also did not like O'Neill's proposal to cover three small feeder creeks and leave the main creek in a narrow streambed subject to more of the flooding that has scoured the stream's banks downstream.

"It would be against everything we stand for" to ignore the critics, O'Neill said, even if he could get government approval for the project.

So he had his staff call Goodman - whose fishing-advocacy group had tangled with the Vanguard Group Inc. and other area businesses over drainage and flooding at their office sites - and began negotiating changes. And O'Neill hired consultants to redraw his plans.

The revised plan, approved by the Department of Environmental Protection in October, is not perfect, Goodman said. "If it takes the storm water abuse, this will be a real amenity," he said. "If their systems function as they say they will, I have no reason to doubt it will ultimately be better. Though we are still concerned about the bigger storms, which we seem to be getting more frequently."

O'Neill said the creek plan would cost up to $10 million; the price tag for the whole project is about $420 million.

By June, O'Neill's crews are to have removed the pipe that carried the creek under the steel mill and to have moved it uphill into a second, temporary pipe. Workers will build 11 storage basins for storm water around the property - some open and landscaped, some covered by retaining walls 20 feet tall.

Water will be pumped from some of the basins to irrigate trees across the Worthington property. Backup power systems will keep the pumps running during storms. O'Neill's team picked native species - serviceberry, red and white oaks, elms, red cedar - not the imported pines and spruce and invasive Norway maples common at older developments.

O'Neill said he would recirculate treated storm water to irrigate the trees and other plantings, from an irrigation control room.

Worthington's grand opening is set for late 2009. The creekside plantings should be in place in the spring of 2009, and they will need at least a year to take root before the creek is restored.

O'Neill said his company was making Little Valley Creek "better than what God put there."

"It's the greenest redevelopment of its kind in the state of Pennsylvania," said Tom Kenny of Haines & Kibblehouse Inc., a Skippack contractor working for O'Neill.

"This natural habitat, it takes a hell of a lot of work," said longtime Valley Creek activist Carl Dusinberre. "Particularly in an area like this, where you've got every developer in hell's half-acre, the state highway department, people moving in and building a thousand-home city. We've had to contend with all these things. We've cooperated with them, and now they're cooperating with us."