Crafted Cranberry
For three full decades, Jerry Andree has been at the helm of Cranberry Township as its manager.
And, while he would never admit to it, Andree has been a catalyst for the continued growth and success of the township, his colleagues say.
“He thanks the board for what we do, but all five of us know that it's Jerry's leadership and Jerry's initiative to set things up before he brings it to us,” Supervisor John Skorupan said. “It helps us make our decisions. We've got all the information we need.
“He's so thorough about everything, he lays out a great scenario for why we should do or shouldn't do it.”
This leadership and initiative stretch back even further than 1991, when Andree took the job as Cranberry Township manager.
While his first job was at a supermarket in high school as a cashier — back when “you had to look at the numbers on a can and punch in the price,” he said — Andree started making his mark in his first postcollege job.Right out of college, he became the director of adult education and recreation at Derry Area High School in Westmoreland County.There, not only did Andree meet his wife, who worked there as a school teacher, he learned the value of a work ethic, reliability, trustworthiness and customer service — all skills he uses to this day.“Amazing how that carries through,” he said.Much like most of Butler County's school districts, Derry Area served a number of municipalities. That, Andree said, prompted him to learn an important skill: intermunicipal collaboration.Without yet steering such collaboration, Andree learned how important it was to get different municipalities, sometimes with vastly different priorities, to cooperate to reach common goals.“I'm just such a firm believer in the value of collaboration and how much more could be done whenever people work together,” he said.With Cranberry's position as a leader in southwest Butler County, the seeds that were planted when Andree worked in Derry have sprouted.And Derry wasn't the only public service position Andree had held before moving to Butler County. He served as the parks and recreation director in Bensalem Township, Bucks County, and as township manager for Hampden Township in Cumberland County.Although those who know him now say he's dedicated his life to Cranberry, Andree has made it his goal to serve the public in whatever community in which he lived.
Though none of the current supervisors were on the board in 1991, they all recall Andree's ideas and initiatives from that era as having affected 2020 Cranberry.One example of that, Skorupan said, was the implementation of the traffic impact fee program. While that fee began before Andree's joining the township, he presided over its aftermath — and, for a few years, before the state explicitly made it legal for townships to charge such fees, it was a bit messy.“I dealt with all the lawsuits and so forth, but the whole impact fee philosophy is to say to developers, 'We want you, we welcome you here, but you have to help pay for the impact of what you're doing,'” Andree said.While some developers and residents worried that the impact fee — which charges developers a dollar amount based on the projected impact to nearby roads and traffic that stem from the influx of housing or businesses — would stifle growth, Andree's innovative thinking did just the opposite.“Developers saw how we were taking their $1 and leveraging it into $5 (through state and federal grants) and investing it in amenities that makes their property so valuable,” Andree said.Although the impact fee program itself led to a number of positives within the township, Andree's colleagues say it is just one example of why he moved Cranberry in the right direction.“He has innovative ideas, and knows how to put them together and make it happen,” Skorupan said. “And if we don't have everyone on board, we go to Harrisburg.”
Cranberry already foresaw the almost inevitable growth and development that would come in a few short years when Andree was hired in 1991. By the mid-'90s, however, the board of supervisors grabbed ahold of the growth in an attempt to steer it.That job was up to Andree.“It really changed in 1995 when we had a couple new board members come on board, ... and the new board member said, 'You know, growth is coming and we better grab hold of this,'” he said. “That's when holy hell broke loose.”
That “holy hell,” he said, was the board recognizing the rapid growth and rapid decline that had happened in other bedroom communities in southwest Pennsylvania. Instead of letting growth happen “haphazardly,” it was Andree's job to give the residents a voice in the process.“We heard loud and clear from the community saying, 'We can't stop property growth. We respect private property rights, but we've got to make sure we manage it to the best interests of the community in the future,'” he said. “And they talked about greater green space requirements, landscape requirements, all the things that pissed off the developers and the big land owners.”
Despite angering developers, Andree and the township kept plugging away at these requirements, eventually resulting in the developers realizing the green space and sidewalk requirements actually added to the value, rather than simply adding costs.“Jerry came in and what he brought to the table was the ability to see the future and to work to implement the vision that the board had at that time and subsequent boards, and his professionalism and his ability to bring people to the table,” supervisors chairman Dick Hadley, a supervisor since 1995, said. “Not all the time everybody agrees on everything. Sometimes you've got to bring people to the table and have honest, heart-to-heart conversations. ... He's brought so many people to the table to bring Cranberry to where it is today.”
Driving through Cranberry, it might be the abundance of commercial properties along Routes 19 and 228 that catch the eye more than the neighborhoods nestled along local and collector roads.But, Andree said, it's the communities, rather than the retail and shopping centers, that attracts people to Cranberry.“We didn't want to be a retail capital center, because retail's here today, gone tomorrow,” he said. “We do view commercial, primarily retail, as, we want enough retail to support our residents.”It wasn't some abstract idea that drove Andree to come to that conclusion, either. It was instead the studying of other municipalities.“We learned to study the life cycle of communities and decisions being made during that life cycle that brought one's life to a quicker ending,” Andree said. “Every community has a life cycle, and our goal was to keep it always on an upward trajectory, never let it go back down.”
Some of those decisions, Andree said, were to “kick the can” on infrastructure costs and creating legacy costs, like long-term health benefits for retired employees or defined-benefit pensions. So, following in — rather, trekking away from — those communities' footsteps, the township coughs up infrastructure costs when it's needed and provides a defined-contribution retirement plan for its employees.Now, while the township still watches patterns that have been set by other municipalities, it has an additional role: leading by example.Andree said he's implicitly, if not explicitly, told nearby communities to watch Cranberry, emulate its successes and learn from its mistakes.But, he said, he understands some municipalities' reticence in following Cranberry's lead.
“It's easy to do nothing. It's hard to do the right thing,” he said. “Imposing restrictions and tough regulations, it's tough. You make people angry.”In his modesty, Andree said there are a number of projects he could have thought of sooner, like unifying the township's water and sewer systems earlier.But, on the whole, not a single Cranberry elected official has faulted him for anything he's done for the township, instead pointing to him as the lodestar of the township's continued success. Even for his upcoming retirement, they say, his planning is bar none.“He lives Cranberry. His work is his life, and I know it's a hard thing for him to walk away because he lives to see that Cranberry's a great community and what can be done to make it better,” supervisor Bruce Mazzoni said. “He has a passion for our community, and even on his exit, all of the planning he has done so that his legacy continues on.”
