Building the new Pegula Ice Arena along University Drive will require more than bricks, mortar and money.
It’s going to require an act of the College Township Council, too.
The 4.7-acre area where Penn State wants to construct the 5,000- to 6,000-seat arena at University Park is not zoned for athletic and recreational facilities, township records show. It’s directly behind Shields Building along University Drive — just northeast of the State College borough border in College Township. A parking lot sits there now.
That land is designated as part of the University Planning District’s Subdistrict 5, geared more toward ‘core campus activities’ such as classrooms and offices, local planner Mark Holdren said.
To enable the new arena development, Penn State has requested that the township rezone the acreage to UPD Subdistrict 9, a designation that does allow athletic and recreational land uses. Holdren prepared a report on the university’s request this month.
‘I don’t see any issues with it,’ Holdren said Wednesday, referring to the request. ‘ … It’s still on the campus itself. It’s not (technically) in the core; it’s adjacent to it. It looks like any (other) thing the university is doing, and I don’t think anyone will have any objection to it.’
Preliminary reviews of the university request by the township Planning Commission and the township Council have yielded no dissent, Holdren said. He is a senior planner with the Centre Region Planning Agency.
A public hearing on the matter is scheduled as part of the Feb. 17 township Council meeting. It will begin at 7 p.m. at the township building, 1481 E. College Ave., State College. Council members may vote that night to approve the zoning change.
Centre Region planning commissioners are expected to weigh in on the issue this winter, as well.
The zoning subdistricts are a relatively new development for the University Park campus, having taken shape in the past decade or so. Each subdistrict has specific density, dimensional, usage, land-coverage and open-space standards, according to municipal documents. Municipal authorities have made those subdistrict standards uniform throughout the campus, which includes acreage in the borough and College and Patton townships.
In years past, Holdren said, prior zoning had essentially permitted Penn State to ‘put anything everywhere.’ He said the subdistricts have created more uniformity for planning purposes, and more guidelines. Those help keep certain parts of campus more dense, others more pastoral, and so on, he said.
University spokeswoman Lisa Powers noted that the land around the proposed ice-arena site is already zoned for athletic facilities.
‘I believe it’s safe to say that the university has long considered this part of campus to be a perfect candidate to be used for improving the athletic complex that dominates that end of campus,’ she wrote in an e-mail message Thursday.
Penn State hockey programs are expected to move into the new Pegula arena by 2014. The project, which remains in design phases, is named for benefactors Terrence M. and Kim Pegula.
Earlier coverage
