Wawa could be coming to the corner of Elkton Road and Otts Chapel Street | Information
The corner of Elkton Road and Otts Chapel Highway could soon be property to Newark’s most recent Wawa if a community developer will get its way.
The developer, Otts Chapel Associates LLC, plans to create a advantage shop with fuel pumps on a six-acre home at 1105 Elkton Road, which is at the moment property to Leon’s Garden Earth and Ewing Towing.
When the job was initially discussed in 2018, it was envisioned to be a Royal Farms, but now it seems a Wawa is extra likely.
“Wawa or Royal Farms. Ideal now, we foresee a Wawa,” Shawn Tucker, a lawyer for the developer, explained Tuesday.
There is by now a Wawa just a 50 % a mile down Elkton Highway in Maryland, but it was not immediately very clear if that a person would stay open if the new one particular is accepted. Acquiring two Wawas near collectively is not unheard of in Delaware – a couple of many years in the past, Wawa opened a store near the corner of Capitol Path and Harmony Road, considerably less than two miles from an current retail outlet on Ogletown-Stanton Highway.
It would be Wawa’s next endeavor to open on Elkton Highway in Newark. A 2013 proposal to construct a Wawa at the Park N Store drew intense opposition from close by inhabitants and was abandoned.
On Tuesday, the developer been given the very first of various rounds of approvals needed for the 1105 Elkton Road project when the planning commission proposed city council annex the house into the Town of Newark and rezone it from industrial to basic enterprise.
If council agrees, the developer must then seek approval from the Federal Crisis Management Company. The web page sits in a floodplain, though the developer options to regrade the internet site to take it out of the flood zone.
If FEMA indications off, the developer can then file progress programs with the town and find a main subdivision and a particular-use permit for the fuel pumps.
The annexation and rezoning request were being uncontroversial, and the scheduling fee voted 6- in favor.
“The site is virtually a doughnut hole of New Castle County surrounded by the Metropolis of Newark, and 1 of the items the condition is encouraging by means of annexation is to remove these doughnut holes and some of the complications that go with them,” Commissioner Alan Silverman said.
Commissioner Will Hurd added that rezoning the internet site business is a rational shift.
“That corner is a really lively corner, and industrial will make much more sense there than preserving the industrial zoning,” Hurd explained.
The only opposition to the venture came from Andrew O’Donnell, a resident of close by Arbour Park and a member of the city’s Conservation Advisory Commission.
“Building yet another gas station is not what we need for battling climate transform correct now,” O’Donnell claimed. “This is like setting up horseshoes and barns although we’re switching from horses to cars and trucks. It’s the improper route.”