Scranton plans to continue its membership in a regional planning collaboration with eight other municipalities in Lackawanna County.<\/p>\n
Scranton City Council on Tuesday unanimously introduced an ordinance from Mayor Paige Gebhardt Cognetti to extend the city\u2019s membership in the nine-member Scranton-Abingtons Planning Association, which includes Scranton, Clarks Green, Clarks Summit, Dalton, Dunmore, Newton Twp., South Abington Twp., Waverly Twp. and West Abington Twp.<\/p>\n
SAPA allows municipalities to share land uses, and the towns must be contiguous to participate. In the works as a concept since 2006, SAPA started in 2015 but only became effective in December 2023 after all members had approved a new zoning ordinance.<\/p>\n
All nine participating towns had drafted zoning ordinances influenced by a joint comprehensive plan \u2014 a 300-plus-page guide for future development and appropriate land uses in the towns. However, before the zoning collaborative could take effect, each town had to pass its own zoning ordinance first. The seven Abingtons communities all passed their ordinances by mid-June 2021, but the process took Scranton and Dunmore an additional two years.<\/p>\n
The SAPA intergovernmental agreement is set to expire June 30, and an extension \u201cwill spell out more specific timelines\u201d for a further expiration date and for various contingencies, such as if a municipality withdraws early, though \u201call municipalities will likely collaborate on extending it,\u201d according to the proposed legislation pending before Scranton City Council.<\/p>\n
Towns normally have to allow every type of land use somewhere within their borders, including undesirable uses. Under a zoning collaborative like SAPA, if one town allows the land use, such as a landfill, the others don\u2019t have to allow it.<\/p>\n
Resident Tom Coyne told council that a SAPA update should look to address the proliferation of data centers.<\/p>\n
Council also voted 5-0 \u2014 with council President Tom Schuster, Patrick Flynn, Mark McAndrew, Sean McAndrew and Jessica Rothchild all in favor \u2014 to introduce a separate ordinance authorizing the city to seek a $22,205 state grant as a funding match toward updating the SAPA collaboration.<\/p>\n
Schuster said council will ask whether all SAPA members are still participating and having regular meetings and communications.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scranton plans to continue its membership in a regional planning collaboration with eight other municipalities in Lackawanna County.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":85722,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[201,182,139,28,178,180,179,181],"class_list":["post-92953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scranton","tag-lackawanna-county","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-scranton","tag-scranton-headlines","tag-scranton-news","tag-top-stories-stt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92953"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92953\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/85722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}