CENTER TWP — Supervisors planned Wednesday evening to formally address a dispute over drainage at the Veterans Affairs center.

Ron Flatt, board chairman, suggested the board send a letter to Cambridge Healthcare Solutions, the developer of the Abie Abraham VA Health Care Center.

The township still holds the company’s $679,000 bond and plans to wield it to force a fix to the drainage problem once Cambridge asks for its cash, Flatt said.

Such a letter would join an intervention by the state Department of Environmental Protection, which recently served notice to the company advising that it must reappraise its stormwater drainage system or risk ongoing, expensive fines and legal action.

Flatt said he had received word that Cambridge had responded to the DEP and plans to study the system. Flatt continued to state that runoff simply flows off the land and onto the neighbor’s property.

“There is literally no stormwater retention happening there at this time, nor has there been since November of 2017,” Flatt said.

Flatt also acknowledged that Dale Herold, whose farmland is one of the main properties being affected by the runoff, has requested a meeting with the board to discuss planned development of the property.

After discussing the drainage issue in a public meeting, the board entered a closed-door session to further discuss parts of the situation that Flatt said had legal implications.

Brown Road

Greg Brewster, the township’s street department foreman, said that Penn-Energy, which recently bought Rex Energy, had agreed to pave from Unionville Road to the natural gas facility on Brown Road.

The company, he said, would also give free materials, such as rock, for a repair to the other section of road that is currently damaged and reduced to one lane of traffic.

The supervisors discussed such a repair with Brewster, who said he worried about taking on such a project so late in the year.

Eventually, a relatively shallow patch using the free rock was agreed upon. Such a patch will be planned to last the winter.

The plan may still face hiccups: Flatt said a repair would need to abide by an engineer report on the damage, and a hasty job may threaten a protected stream below the road.