College Township Council on Thursday reviewed final plans for the first phase of a development that will create hundreds of new residential units in the Dale Summit area.
Burkentine Builders 48-acre planned residential development will be located on the west side of Shiloh Road and north of Trout Road, and the council conditionally approved a tentative plan for the overall project in April.
The 21.6-acre first phase at the south end of the development, behind the Pleasant Pointe apartment complex, will construct 197 units, including 64 fee-simple townhomes, 55 rental townhomes and two three-story apartment buildings, one with 42 units and one with 36 units. It will also have a 9,721-square-foot community center with a clubhouse, pool, pickleball courts, tot lot and parking.
Phase two of the development, for which a plan submission is anticipated in 2028, will be built out over multiple sub-phases and will construct three apartment buildings with 168, 144 and 120 units — bringing the total number of residential units to 629. The second phase also has a 6.4-acre lot designated for commercial use, as well as amenity space.
The project has 12 acres of open space.
Sixty-two residential units, or about 10% of the total as required by township ordinance, will be designated for the township’s workforce housing program administered by the Centre County Housing and Land Trust. Phase one will have 18 workforce housing units: eight one-bedroom apartments, six three-bedroom rental townhomes, and four three-bedroom fee simple townhomes. The remainder will be allocated in phase two with 44 one- and two-bedroom apartments.
Access to the development will be from an extension of Pleasant Pointe Drive and a new street, Beckham Boulevard, connecting to Shiloh Road. The Centre Area Transportation Authority will service the development, with a bus stop to be located on the Pleasant Pointe Drive extension near the community center.
The long-in-the-works project was the subject of myriad public hearings and meetings leading up to the tentative plan approval, and council had few questions about the specifics of the plan on Thursday night.
Lindsay Schoch, College Township principal planner, said that staff have reviewed the plan since it was submitted in October and the developer has already submitted a revision that addressed most of the technical comments.
She added that council’s review is limited to ensuring the final plan is consistent with the tentative plan, which it appears to be.
“The comments were all technical in nature,” John Sepp, of project engineer PennTerra, said. “Definitely no major comments, because there was so much work done at the tentative level of this plan. It was a very detailed tentative plan. Now we’re just ironing out really the minor technical issues that remain. I think we’ve hit 90% of them with the last submission. I feel there’s not much left to revise in this plan.”
Based on the early October submission of the plan and an extension granted by Burkentine, council has until Dec. 21 to take final action. That is expected to occur at its Dec. 18 meeting.
“I think we should all be really proud of this effort,” Council President Eric Bernier said. “How often you work with conditional use project, I don’t know but this can be a complicated and labor-intensive process. Thanks to staff and the folks you’re working with it has gone about as well as it possibly could.”
The developer is hoping to break ground for phase one in 2026. According to the plan set, the first phase is projected for completion in the fall of 2028.
