Design a Beautiful Blog

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Jul 21, 2022

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The URA owns the land between the houses in Swisshelm Park and the Nine Mile Run Trail along the creek in Frick Park. Many people call this area The Slags.

The URA has plans to remediate the area by covering the exposed slag material, developing some portion of the land into solar farms that will feed the local power grid, and donating the rest of the land to the City of Pittsburgh to expand Frick Park. You can visit the URA's Swisshelm Park Solar Farm info page at any time for more information about the project and maps of the area.

Share your thoughts on the solar farm design directly with decision makers!

Good news: The URA's remediation work is almost over! That means there is a very limited amount of time to report project related damage or give a suggestion on how to leave the Love St. entrance until the solar construction starts, so don't wait to get in touch with the URA by emailing Lfreedman@ura.org and CC'ing swisshelmforward@gmail.com ASAP.

At the virtual community meeting with the URA on July 17, 2025 we learned that the URA's remediation work is ahead of schedule and that the do still plan to build solar farms in the slags.

Here is the update from the 7/14/25 URA slag remediation project meeting We will continue to provide you regular updates here and in our monthly newsletter. We will also add them to our URA's Swisshelm Park Solar Farm Facebook Album (https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61565557836730) and here.

Here is the information we've gotten from the URA since 6/25/25. We will continue to provide you regular updates here and in our monthly newsletter. We will also add them to our URA's Swisshelm Park Solar Farm Facebook Album (https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61565557836730).

We’ve been talking to Ms. Freedman, the Project Manager for the remediation project, about what actions residents can take if the contractor's activities cause damage to your property, e.g. the water damage some residents have reported. We want to make it clear that the existence of the Swisshelm Forward RCO doesn't limit any resident's right to contact the URA or the contractor directly, and everyone should feel free to do that. In fact, our job is to ensure that you know how to speak directly to the decision makers about local development projects. Sometimes, the more voices the better. Swisshelm Forward will be better informed of goings on if you copy swisshelmforward@gmail.com on any communication you have with the URA or Brex.

URA slag remediation and tree removal follow up: We had a productive meeting with the URA that resulted in changes to information sharing procedures and ensured our community has a seat at the table. Some of the changes to the URA project page (https://www.ura.org/pages/swisshelm-park-solar) are already visible, and we will add a comment on this post as the others come online.

In May of 2025 a concerned resident alerted Swisshelm Forward that the URA appeared to be deviating from their published tree removal and replacement plan during the course of the remediation work. Here is the development update about this and a list of our requests to the URA.

The most recent public meeting was in January of 2025. The URA engineers and contractors who will perform the remediation were there to give in depth answers to questions about the remediation construction. Remediation construction will begin in March. If you weren't able to make it to the meeting, we couldn't quite fit our summary into one panel, but we still tried to get the most important information condensed into a few phone screen sized images for you.

Their last public meeting on the project was in August of 2024. This meeting was focused mostly on the remediation portion of the project. We know that a lot of information was presented at this meeting. One of our goals is to keep our neighbors informed about developments happening in our area. We did our best to collect and summarize the URA's answers to the most common questions people have been asking about the project. We hope our signature phone screen sized summary images are a useful resources for you. We also encourage you to visit the URA's info page on the project https://www.ura.org/pages/swisshelm-park-solar for more details .