Bern Township: what's planned at W. Leesport & Faller Lane
Land clearing has begun at W. Leesport Road and Faller Lane in Bern Township: a Penske truck center is permitted; a 260,000-sq-ft warehouse plan stalled.
By The Berks Beat staff · Published July 25, 2026 · Updated July 25, 2026 · Bern Township
Heavy equipment is moving dirt on the big tract along W. Leesport Road at Faller Lane in Bern Township. Berks Beat observed excavators, bulldozers, and large soil stockpiles on the site on Friday, July 25.
Two projects are on the books for that ground, and they are in very different places. A Penske truck collision and repair center holds the permits and agreements that let construction start. A 260,352-square-foot warehouse proposed next door, for a bottled-water distributor tied to Reading’s Crossroads Beverage Group, was turned down on a key zoning request in April and has no construction permit in any public record we could find.
One tract, two buyers
The land is the former 52-acre Stinson Drive Partners tract, on the northeast side of W. Leesport Road around the Faller Lane intersection. County plan files show developers have circled it since at least 2021, when NorthPoint Development sketched a “Logistic Center 222” there on 80 acres then owned by Reitnouer Real Estate.
In 2024 the tract split in two:
- Penske Truck Leasing Co LP bought the 22.68-acre lot in August 2024 for $3.8 million, county deed records show.
- Reading One Three, LLC bought the 28.11-acre lot, plus a small house parcel at 1067 W. Leesport Road, in November 2024 for $4.7 million.
The Penske project is the one cleared to build
Penske’s plan is a 10-bay truck collision and repair shop of about 47,000 square feet, per the county’s plan-review records, reached from a new extension of Faller Lane.
Its paper trail is complete as far as the public record goes. The township Planning Commission recommended conditional approval of the preliminary plan in May 2025 and had the final plan on its agenda that July. The state published the project’s construction stormwater permit, the approval that legally allows land clearing over an acre, in April 2025 (permit PAC060456, issued through the Berks County Conservation District). By October 2025 the supervisors’ agenda carried the project’s stormwater and municipal improvements agreements, the contracts a developer signs before putting shovels in the ground.
One gap to note: the November 2025 supervisors minutes, where final plan approval likely appears, have vanished from the township’s website, so we could not read the approval itself. Every surrounding record treats the project as approved, and by January 2026 township planners were referring to the “Penske detention basin” as an existing design fact.
The warehouse next door hit a wall
The bigger proposal on the tract is the “Stinson Drive Property LD Plan”: one warehouse of 260,352 square feet on the Reading One Three lot, submitted to the county in December 2025. Township minutes say the building would operate around the clock, seven days a week.
Reading One Three, LLC is registered to Kirk E. Richmond at 1055 Crossroads Blvd in Reading, the address of Crossroads Beverage Group, and township minutes from January 2025 record the plan being presented for Cross Roads Beverage, which was “looking to open a distribution center to store and distribute bottled water.”
Neighbors pushed back from the first public look. At the January 2025 Planning Commission meeting, residents raised the homes along W. Leesport Road that would face the warehouse, truck noise, and traffic. This spring a resident urged the supervisors to deny the company’s zoning request outright.
The zoning fight came to a head over height. The warehouse plan asked for a 45-foot building where the ordinance allows 35 feet. The Planning Commission declined to recommend it in January. On April 7, 2026, the Board of Supervisors denied the height request 5-0. A month earlier, the board had put the underlying plan on a clock: extend the review deadline past April 13 or be rejected. After the April denial, the plan disappears from the township record. No approval, no extension, and no construction stormwater permit for the warehouse lot appears anywhere we searched, including every Pennsylvania Bulletin permit notice published in 2025 and 2026 to date.
So whose dirt is flying?
The only project at this corner with a documented permit to disturb earth is Penske’s. We have not confirmed with the township or the conservation district exactly which lot the current equipment is working on, and we will. If work were happening on the warehouse lot, no public record we reviewed authorizes it; the far more likely reading is that the Penske site and the new Faller Lane extension are what’s underway.
What to watch
- Which lot is being cleared. We will ask the township and the Berks County Conservation District to confirm. The district’s permit files are not posted online; records can be requested directly or through a right-to-know request.
- Whether the warehouse plan is dead or dormant. The April 13 rejection deadline plus the height denial leave its status unclear. A revised plan with a 35-foot building could return to the Planning Commission, which meets next on August 11 at 7:30 p.m.
- The Faller Lane extension. Township minutes tie road improvements at Faller Lane and W. Leesport Road to the Penske project, with the township weighing its own improvements “if (Lot 2) Penske does not make the future improvements.”
Development pressure on this stretch of Bern Township is not new; the township is also drafting data-center zoning, part of a wave we track in our report on Berks townships writing data-center rules, and a quarter mile southwest, Riverfront Federal Credit Union is moving a drive-thru ATM plan through review at the Route 183 corner.
We will update this report once the township or conservation district confirms what the current site work covers.