Alpine Motorsports Club?

[Phokaioglaukos]

Roar ahead raises uproar now
By Diane Mastrull

Inquirer Staff Writer

Posted on Sun, May. 4, 2008

Up on Blue Mountain, 1,500 feet above the commotion of the fast-developing Lehigh Valley, hikers ply the Appalachian Trail against a soundtrack of songbirds and the wind-rustled forest.


Soon, though, nature's symphony could be accompanied by a roar.

Less than a half-mile from the trail, a 4.2-mile road course for high-performance cars is planned for the north face of the mountain in Eldred Township, Monroe County, near Allentown. Once the $30 million Alpine Motorsports Club opens, forecast for summer 2009, Ferrari F430s and Porsche Carreras will race through hairpin turns and up steep inclines at more than 75 m.p.h., seven days a week from spring till winter.

For more than three years, environmental groups fought the club in state courts, and lost. The project is virtually a done deal, awaiting only a state review of stormwater-management permits for building to begin.

The track's impending presence has sent State Rep. Robert Freeman (D., Northampton) on a race of his own - to pass a law that, while too late to put the brakes on Alpine, would prevent the future "marring" of the landscape along the Appalachian Trail's 229-mile Pennsylvania leg.

The trail, a patchwork of state and federal property, is on average 1,000 feet wide. Freeman's House Bill 1281 would require all 55 trailside communities - from Delaware Water Gap to Pen Mar on the Maryland border - to adopt zoning that would "conserve and maintain" the land abutting it. The House passed the bill in December, 169-22. The Senate could vote on it as early as tomorrow.

"Without the protection of a good zoning ordinance, the pristine setting of the Appalachian Trail will always be vulnerable to developmental pressures," Freeman said last week.

If his bill passes, Dick Muller Jr., Alpine Motorsports' president, will have slipped in under the wire. Although his project was the catalyst for what could be a new, tough law, "I don't feel responsible," he said. "I can't worry about what's going on . . . at the legislative level unless it impacts me."

Freeman isn't the first state lawmaker to fret over the trail's changing environs. In April 1978, the legislature passed the Pennsylvania Appalachian Trail Act, urging towns along the way to pass ordinances to preserve its "natural, scenic, historic and aesthetic values."

What the legislation did not do was force them.

In the last 30 years, most communities have adopted protective zoning, typically restricting the use of land along the footpath to open space or recreation. However, by Freeman's estimate, nine central Pennsylvania townships - in Lebanon, Cumberland, Dauphin, Franklin and Schuylkill Counties - have no such ordinances.

He noted that farms border many of the trail's most scenic, and unprotected, sections. "We could witness the loss of some of the most spectacular and tranquil [trail] settings within the course of one building season," he warned, "as farmland is converted into sprawl development."

Hiked by four million people a year, the 2,175-mile Appalachian National Scenic Trail stretches through 14 states, from Georgia to Maine. New Jersey has 72 miles of it, running mostly through state or federally protected lands.

Even in some of its more remote locations, the trail is under "a constant deluge of threats," said Karen Lutz, director of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy's Mid-Atlantic office near Carlisle, Pa. The nonprofit volunteer group was a plaintiff in the litigation to stop Alpine.

In Virginia, the trail's advocates are fighting a proposed power line that industry officials contend would make the Northeast electric grid more dependable. The Trans-Allegheny Interstate Line would run from northern Virginia through West Virginia to just south of Pittsburgh, with sections skimming the trail.

The footpath had a near miss at its northern end: more than 50 lighted, 400-foot-tall wind turbines proposed for a mountaintop in Maine, some within a mile of the trail. The 2004 plan died, and Maine is looking for other locations.

In Pennsylvania, Eldred Township is among the communities with zoning that protects the trail's environs. But it had yet to enact its ordinance when Muller, Alpine's developer, agreed in May 2001 to buy 350 acres on Blue Mountain's lower plateau - the last parcel of what had been an 800-acre retreat for a New York garment industry executive.

"The price was right. The location was ideal, equidistant between New York and Philadelphia," said Muller, a sports-car enthusiast from Bethlehem, Pa., who "liquidated" a 1988 red Ferrari Testarossa to help finance his resort.

The absence of zoning, he said, was another lure.

Eldred Township approved his development plans, including not only the road course but also a clubhouse, storage garages for members' cars, service and fueling stations, a restaurant, and a pro shop.

The Blue Mountain Preservation Association and the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (then the Trail Conference) went immediately to Common Pleas Court and then to Commonwealth Court to try to halt the project. The courts found nothing in the township's land-use regulations or in the Appalachian Trail Act to stop Muller.

The rulings prompted Charles Elliott, a land-use lawyer from nearby Easton, to ask Freeman to fix the act.

Pennsylvania legislators have long been loath to dictate land-use policy to local governments. But Freeman noted that his bill, with tinkering by the Senate Environmental Resources Committee, would give communities considerable control over how much land to zone.

A frequent critic of any legislation that would limit development - the Pennsylvania Builders Association - is not opposing the bill since it would have "minimal impact" on the industry, spokesman Scott Elliott said.

The Pennsylvania State Association of Township Supervisors also is remaining neutral, even though the creation of zoning ordinances is time-consuming and costly, as assistant executive director Elam Herr pointed out. Under Freeman's bill, towns could get technical assistance and grants.

Muller said he knew what was time-consuming and costly: The battles over his resort have added $5 million to its cost. With construction possibly starting as soon as this summer, however, he already has signed up 300 members. The preopening family fee is $44,000 - a 50 percent discount - with $5,000 in annual dues.

Muller hasn't trekked the Appalachian Trail, but, he said, "I appreciate the people that do." Alpine will abide by local noise ordinances, he said, adding that cars on the track "will be muffled" and "out of earshot" of hikers.

Impossible, said the conservancy's Lutz. According to sound tests conducted for the group's court cases, people four miles away on the trail could hear a low roar.

Alpine is "not a bad development proposal," she said. "It's just the wrong place."