Churchill residents challenge Amazon distribution facility in court

A group in Churchill has filed a court challenge to block the approval of a new Amazon warehouse approved by borough council last month.

Churchill Future, which lobbied against the proposal, said in an appeal filed in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court that the project fails to meet a number of requirements in the borough’s zoning regulations, including related to noise, traffic and visual impression.

“[T]he distribution center is wholly inconsistent with past development of the borough and its current character,” the court filing said.

The facility, to be located on Beulah Road at the former George Westinghouse Research Park, was approved by a 5-2 vote, on Dec. 21. The vote followed 14 days of public hearing that featured 55 hours of testimony, as well as a year of debate by council members and the borough planning commission.

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Gavin Robb, borough solicitor, said he received the appeal on Friday and is reviewing it. He had no further comment.

Among the reasons cited by council members who voted in favor of the plan, proposed by Hillwood Development, were increasing commercial tax revenue in the borough — the facility could bring as many as 1,000 full-time jobs.

The project would be a 2.6 million square foot distribution and logistics facility for Amazon.

According to the court filing, three of the council members who voted in favor of the project, President Jay Dorwin, Matt Castiglia, and Diane Law, expressed their support for it prior to the hearings and therefore should have abstained from voting because of bias.

If they had, the filing said, the vote would have been 2-2, and the project would not have been approved.

Further, Churchill Future argues in their appeal that the proposal fails to address potential noise at the distribution center as is required by the borough code, and that its traffic impact study was flawed.

At one of the hearings, an acoustical engineer obtained by Churchill Future testified that none of the proposed noise mitigation measures would affect off-site noise “which will impact the community and surrounding residential neighborhoods 24 hours per day.” They wrote that the “only effective way to mitigate such a severe noise impact is to eliminate it.”

Regarding traffic, Churchill Future alleges in their filing that the developer’s traffic impact study failed to evaluate the impact of the number of trucks and traffic near homes there.

“The failure of the [traffic impact study] to utilize actual data from similar Amazon distribution sites makes the [traffic impact study] untrustworthy,” they wrote.