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The following excerpt is credited to Evan Brandt’s article in the Pottstown Mercury, July 17, 2023:

Historic Building bill got its start in Pottstown : PAED effort spurred Rep. Ciresi to craft the legislation 

“… Certainly, no one is more familiar with that challenge than Lee-Clark. So last year, she started gathering a group of architects, building owners, business people and other interested parties to try to figure out how to make it easier to re-purpose the historic architecture which makes downtown Pottstown so unique.

“We started with how do you change the legislation, but we quickly realized there was no way we were going to change federal law for things like handicapped access, and frankly we didn’t want to,” Lee-Clark said.

“Then we started looking at the fire code and a couple of different other things. We brought in people from Hatboro-Horsham, from Norristown, from Bridgeport, from Conshohocken,” said Lee-Clark. “And eventually we realized the most helpful thing we could do, the most expeditious, is to find a way to help cover those costs, rather than try to change the laws.”

What they settled on is a grant program “that can help make the numbers work,” Lee-Clark said. “So we wrote a white paper for a pilot program and we presented it to Representative Ciresi.”

The result?  House Bill 1573 would create a two-year pilot program administered by DCED to help renovate and redevelop historic and older buildings across Pennsylvania. The program, the “Historic and Older Building Redevelopment Assistance Grant Program,” would address the greater challenges and higher costs involved in bringing older buildings up to code.

Lee-Clark said the legislation she saw indicates that only commercial buildings 50 years old or older would be eligible for the grants…

Read more… www.pottsmerc.com/2023/07/17/historic-buildings-bill-got-its-start-in-pottstown/

Photo: Pottstown Mercury

 

Historic buildings bill got its start in Pottstown

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