Senior Care Facility Planned for Benner Commerce Park

Centre County’s Board of Commissioners on Tuesday heard an overview of plans for a new personal care center for older adults to be located in Benner Township.

Plans for The Fountains at State College include an 18,536-square-foot assisted living facility on a 6.6-acre lot at the southern corner of Penntech Drive and Progress Drive in the Benner Commerce Park. The parcel is directly east of Happy Valley Blended Products and west of Cleveland Brothers.

The facility will have 30 beds and approximately nine employees, said Christopher Schnure, Centre County subdivision and land development planner, said. It will be accessible from the cul-de-sac at the end of Progress Drive.

Benner Commerce Park is in the township’s industrial zoning district, where personal care facilities are a permitted use, Schnure said

The Fountains Group operates personal care facilities in DuBois, Indiana and Latrobe, as well as separate memory care centers. The senior living complexes offer medication management, assistance with daily activities, dining rooms, salon services, specialized staff and planned entertainment and activities, according to the company’s website.

The Fountains at State College is expected to be “very similar” to the other locations, Schnure said.

Board of Commissioners Chair Mark Higgins noted that multiple federal, state and local agencies project the number of older adults in Centre County to rise in the coming years, with the number of “super seniors” — those 85 and older — predicted to double from 3,000 to 6,000 between 2022 and 2050.

“Once you get up to that age, you’re probably not interested in maintaining a house anymore, but you’re perhaps not quite ready to head to Centre Care, which last time I checked had a multiple month waiting list,” Higgins said. “So I suspect that this is a potential solution for people to stay here for a while. Maybe they get better, they can move back to a townhome or a condo, or maybe they stay there a while.”

The commissioners voted unanimously to advance for approval on Nov. 10 a memorandum of understanding among the county, township and the developer for the developer to reimburse costs associated with processing, reviewing, inspecting and approving the engineering aspects of the plan. It does not represent approval of the land development plan for the project, which will still need to go through county and township planning processes.

A personal care facility will be an outlier among the Benner Commerce Park businesses, which currently include Cleveland Brothers, Happy Valley Blended Products, SilcoTek, Homeland Manufacturing, KCF Technologies, the Pennsylvania State Police Rockview Barracks and the Amazon distribution warehouse that opened earlier this year