Here’s how a State High parking expansion could ease congestion on neighborhood streets

After concerns about students parking on neighborhood streets, State College Area High School is looking to expand one of its parking lots, which district officials say is one step toward fixing a larger parking problem.

A Tuesday design review meeting of the State College Borough saw a presentation by Matt Harlow from ELA Group, the engineering group designing the project, about expanding the North Campus parking lot. Harlow said the parking lot would be extended to include 50 additional spaces, reducing the parking deficit from 40% to 36%.

The 50-spot expansion to the student lot across the street from the Weis on Westerly Parkway will help alleviate parking problems in the neighborhood surrounding State High. The State High campus currently has 821 total spaces, 340 of which are available to students.

When the school was built in 2015 the district was granted a conditional use permit for a parking reduction, allowing it to construct 788 parking spaces instead of the required 1,330 spaces. So before construction bids can go out, the planning commission will have to amend the district’s conditional use permit.

Parking concerns have grown since COVID, Harlow said, when the number of students driving rather than taking the bus increased.

“The students that can’t find spaces out there, they’re finding them somewhere, and it’s on borough streets,” Harlow said. “So with this, we have accommodations already in place to make it an easy project to get 50 relatively easy and inexpensive parking spaces.”

Harlow said the project would not require a traffic study and would cause no closures to roadways or sideways. Construction would start in March 2025 and finish in May.

Randy Brown, the district’s finance and operations officer, said the project is just a start to fixing parking and that the district is looking at adding additional parking off of Irvin Avenue, behind the district’s Physical Plant building. Brown could not give a cost estimate on the project as bids have not been submitted.

“We know that there’s a bigger demand than we have supply,” Brown said. “But we also know that we need to work with the borough and we can’t ask them to waive their restrictions, because the residents have the right to have access to their streets.”

The planning commission’s next meeting is Thursday, Oct. 9.

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