Driver fumes he can’t leave his own driveway after change to street outside his home – he’s spent $1000s to fix it

A home owner has spent thousands of dollars attempting to resolve a problem that prevents him from leaving his driveway.

Jerry Smith, who has lived in his Merrin Road house for 20 years, is facing a bold move from a local school.

The Dallastown Area School District authorized a secondary driveway for one of its elementary schools at the beginning of the academic year. This driveway would link the school to a residential road.

However, the choice has made it extremely difficult for Smith and his neighbors to enter and exit their homes.

Smith told Fox 43: “It would be done with no regard for other people on the street at all if it weren’t for my wife and I actually going and getting an attorney.”

He went on: “If I have fifty cars coming up through on my way to the school, how am I going to exit my driveway and navigate the road?”

The school system claims that the new driveway eventually makes it safer for the students who attend, even though the school acknowledges that the alteration has made things riskier for homes on Merrin Road for both automobiles and walkers.

The Merrin Road work is now required by Pennsylvania law, which mandates that schools have two exits in case of an emergency, such a school shooting.

Smith weighed in on this and added, “Please, go ahead, get all the children out if they need to use our road for emergency egress.”

However, they included a disclaimer saying we will also use this for our car-rider traffic, which is something we find unacceptable.

Smith claims he has spent thousands of dollars on legal counsel to fight the move, but he has encountered problems.

He acknowledged that we had spent thousands of dollars.

We discovered that there is a conflict of interest because all of the lawyers are employed by the Dallastown School District.

Because the municipality and the school system are so powerful, it is quite difficult to oppose them, so no one wanted to take the case.

Another problem is that the school system did not have to perform a traffic study because they just suggested a new driveway.

Locals had hoped that the road would be expanded to handle the growing volume of traffic and that walkways would be added.

At a meeting on September 24, Smith disclosed that he had paid a contractor to conduct a survey and traffic analysis on Merrin Road, which was then presented to the zoning board.

Nevertheless, later in October, Smith’s appeal was rejected by the zoning board members of York Township.

Smith said he isn’t going to give up and is already planning his next course of action to keep his street safe.

We’ll need to determine whether we can afford to file an appeal with a higher court, he stated.

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