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Lordstown Planning Commission gives conditional approval to HomeGoods site plan
Company must conduct traffic study two years after facility opens for three intersections
By Ed Runyan
LORDSTOWN
The Lordstown Planning Commission gave TJX/HomeGoods a 4-0 conditional site-plan approval Monday for construction of its 1.2-million square foot distribution center on Ellsworth Bailey Road.
Among the conditions for final approval are that the company conduct a traffic study two years after the facility opens for three intersections that are not currently scheduled to have traffic signals – at the relocated Hallock Young Road, at the entrance that the trucks will use, and at Pritchard-Ohltown Road.
Two employee entrances will have traffic signals.
The warehouse is expected to use Ellsworth Bailey Road.
There will be an emergency-only access to Hallock Young from the plant, said engineer Jesse Lee of MS Consultants of Youngstown, which wrote the site plan.
The planning commission granted a waiver on one township zoning requirement. The facility will only have to have 998 parking spaces plus 20 more Americans With Disabilities Act spaces instead of the 2,472 spaces required by the township formula of one space per 500 square feet of building.
Henry Chan of Ware Malcolm Architects showed a map of the lighting outside of the warehouse indicating that the lighting will be directed at certain areas and will not involve “spillout” of light off of the property.
The 4-0 vote came at the end of a two-hour meeting that included a presentation of about 45 minutes from engineer Christopher Kogelnik with CT Consultants of Youngstown, which has been working on behalf of the village to review all of the technical issues within the site plan.
Kogelnik described numerous matters that he wants the company to change but said the issues are minor.
“I feel confident about the design in general. There are many small things that need to be addressed,” he said. It should take a couple more weeks to get the last permits from the Army Corp of Engineers and Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, he said.
“I think by the end of April, if that’s what it’s going to be ... it’ll be safe that they will be able to break ground if they have permits in hand and all of the other documents.”
Kogelnik said he thinks the “things I’ve raised here are pretty trivial in the grand scheme of the design.”
Early in the meeting, Lee discussed the ability of the retention pond at the site to provide water for firefighting purposes as well as to absorb storm-water runoff exceeding what would be expected from a 100-year storm.
Before voting on the site plan, planning commission chairman Tim Reich asked whether any commission member felt it would be appropriate to open up the meeting to general comments.
Mayor Arno Hill, a member of the planning commission, said he didn’t believe “any new issues will be brought forward than in the eight to 10 meetings we’ve had before,” and no general comments were allowed.