{"id":822,"date":"2018-09-17T10:41:48","date_gmt":"2018-09-17T15:41:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nittanyvalley-eco.org\/?p=822"},"modified":"2018-09-17T10:41:48","modified_gmt":"2018-09-17T15:41:48","slug":"updates-from-a-chester-county-court-battle-of-people-v-toll-brothers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nittanyvalley-eco.org\/index.php\/2018\/09\/17\/updates-from-a-chester-county-court-battle-of-people-v-toll-brothers\/","title":{"rendered":"Updates from a Chester County Court Battle of People v. Toll Brothers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via Neighbors for Crebilly<\/a>:<\/p>\n

BACKGROUND<\/span><\/p>\n

Crebilly Farm in Westtown Township is one of the last large expanses of unspoiled, unprotected open space in eastern Chester County, Pennsylvania. It’s also land on which part of the Battle of the Brandywine was fought on September 11, 1777, with Hessian Jaegers \u2013 who were\u00a0attempting a flanking maneuver of the American lines \u2013 taking artillery fire from the American position at\u00a0Sandy Hollow near the Birmingham Friends Meetinghouse.<\/p>\n

Yet despite this land’s historical importance, Toll Brothers has proposed a\u00a0huge 317 unit housing development on\u00a0these hallowed 325 acres where our forebears fought and died for our freedom.<\/p>\n

UPDATE – Sept. 15, 2018<\/a><\/p>\n

As you know,\u00a0Neighbors for Crebilly\u00a0has been permitted by Chester County Common Pleas Court to intervene in Toll Brothers’ appeal of Westtown’s denial of their conditional use application. Oral arguments in this appeal will made this Monday, September 17th at 1 pm in courtroom #1. Please join us if you can.<\/p>\n

A quick word about Toll’s legal arguments\u00a0which, as you can imagine, mock reality.\u00a0Their lawyer, Greg Adelman,\u00a0actually argued in a recent\u00a0brief to the court that the\u00a0Environmental Rights Amendment<\/a>\u00a0should not be applied to the “conditional use process,”\u00a0a bizarre\u00a0line of argument\u00a0to say the least, and that our legal brief should be quashed. What Toll would have the court believe is that laws passed by the PA state legislature \u2013 including\u00a0the PA municipal planning code of which the “conditional use” process\u00a0is a part \u2013\u00a0must not be examined or questioned in terms of their impact on the environment.<\/p>\n

In other words, the legislature, according to Toll’s lawyer’s\u00a0flawed reasoning,\u00a0can pass any law it chooses regardless of the harm it causes the environment, and the courts must\u00a0not weigh in on those laws.<\/p>\n

But outside Toll’s time-space distortion bubble,\u00a0Courts strike down\u00a0unconstitutional legislation all the time.\u00a0As this conditional use application from Toll Brothers would permanently impair environmental and historic resources at Crebilly Farm, the\u00a0Environmental Rights Amendment\u00a0must take precedence over the conditional use process since the state Constitution supersedes all laws passed by the legislature.<\/p>\n

That’s why the process of amending the constitution is so onerous: the amendment must pass the two legislative houses in two consecutive terms and then be approved by voters. Therefore, the unanimously-passed\u00a0Environment al Rights Amendment\u00a0(Article 1, Section 27) of our state\u00a0constitution,\u00a0outweighs\u00a0 laws passed by the legislature. This amendment\u00a0guarantees environmental protection for\u00a0allpeople in the Commonwealth, including generations yet to come. So it is plainly ludicrous for\u00a0Adelman\u00a0to argue that the E.R.A. must not be considered in the conditional use process.<\/p>\n

It was also curious that Adelman\u00a0would cite as support for his argument any case\u00a0from Commonwealth Court regarding the\u00a0Environmental Rights Amendment since, in 2017, the PA\u00a0Supreme Court threw out the Commonwealth Court’s three part “Payne Test” which had been that Court’s method of ignoring environmental protections afforded state citizens under the Constitution.\u00a0Writing last year for the\u00a0majority in\u00a0Pennsylvania Environmental Defense Foundation vs. the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania<\/a>, “Justice Christine Donohue said the prior interpretation of the amendment, which included a 3-part legal test and [which] was in place for four decades, ‘strips the constitution of its meaning.’\u00a0The opinion clearly defines the role of the state as trustee, which the court said is associated with fiduciary responsibilities.”\u00a0 (Quoted from\u00a0PA State Impact)<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for Adelman’s argument,\u00a0the Pennsylvania\u00a0Environmental Rights Amendment\u00a0occupies higher ground than the\u00a0conditional use process which is merely part of a set of laws which are informed and governed by our state constitution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via Neighbors for Crebilly: BACKGROUND Crebilly Farm in Westtown Township is one of the last large expanses of unspoiled, unprotected open space in eastern Chester County, Pennsylvania. It’s also land on which part of the Battle of the Brandywine was fought on September 11, 1777, with Hessian Jaegers \u2013 who were\u00a0attempting a flanking maneuver of … Continue reading “Updates from a Chester County Court Battle of People v. Toll Brothers”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8NLTc-dg","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nittanyvalley-eco.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nittanyvalley-eco.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nittanyvalley-eco.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nittanyvalley-eco.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nittanyvalley-eco.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=822"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nittanyvalley-eco.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":823,"href":"https:\/\/www.nittanyvalley-eco.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822\/revisions\/823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nittanyvalley-eco.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nittanyvalley-eco.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nittanyvalley-eco.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}