A petition and request for an emergency injunction were filed Friday in Potter County Court to stop the transfer of part of the Coudersport Arboretum to a nearby business.

Councilman Wayne Hathaway explained to The Era why he is in favor of a property transfer, which would allegedly allow for an expansion of Sheetz.

And Dr. Robert Wagner of Friends of the Coudersport Arboretum explained why it would be a bad idea.

“We are proposing to trade a portion of the arboretum,” Hathaway said. “A portion would be moved to a location across the street. At the council meeting this coming Wednesday, it will be put up for bid.”

He explained the county’s housing and redevelopment authority is offering a piece of land of comparable size to the parcel that would be out for bids. For those familiar with the property, the parcel where a caboose sets is the one under consideration for transfer.

“When it first came up a few years ago, I was against it,” Hathaway said. Over time, he changed his mind.

“Sheetz is a business that employs a lot of people in this town. If they could expand their business as they did in Port Allegany, in the long-term, Coudersport would definitely benefit.

“Had it been they were just going to take that ground and the arboretum would be without, I would never go for it,” Hathaway said. The new parcel across the street would be a benefit to the arboretum, he said.

“It is off Route 6,” the councilman explained, saying it would be quieter and not have as much traffic. “Every tree that is there, every bush that is there, every plant that is there would be transferred to the next site.”

That is not acceptable, Wagner said.

“Right behind the caboose are some flowering crabapple trees,” he said. “One of those trees was dedicated to the three children of Bob and Dorothy Smith who died of cystic fibrosis.”

Bob Smith has since passed away. “He was in the Second World War,” Wagner said. “He helped liberate one of the concentration camps. It made a tremendous impact on him.”

Smith would talk about the horrors he saw there. “He came back from war and married Dorothy and had two boys and a girl.”

All three children died in their 20s from cystic fibrosis. The parents donated and dedicated one of the flowering trees to their children.

“This is what the arboretum is all about,” Wagner said. “Some people have $20- or $30,000 in their contributions to the park.

“Sheetz doesn’t need it,” he said. “They are doing fine. There are other properties available.”

Hathaway said he thinks a legal battle over the transfer of the property would drive Sheetz to consider an alternate location for the store. That isn’t a bad thing, except for the fact that the current location would be a vacant storefront.

“(Sheetz) has the best location in the borough,” Hathaway said. “(They) just don’t have enough of it.”

He said he thinks this is a no-win situation.

“No matter what is done, everybody is not going to be in agreement,” the councilman said. “The main thing is when you get into an emotional thing like this, a lot of people throw common sense or reality out the window.”

Wagner, however, said the law is on his side. He pointed to a state Supreme Court decision which said a public park could not be sold or transferred for another purpose unless the court signed off on it.

And he doesn’t feel that splitting the arboretum into two pieces, or trying to relocate the plants and trees, is acceptable. “How many trees, 15 or 20 year old trees, are going to survive that move?”

The issue shouldn’t be about money, Wagner said. “We’re about family and memorials and beauty and we don’t need to have a new beer store.”

Hathaway said to him, it’s about the betterment of Coudersport as a whole.

“It’s my belief it is my job to represent the borough of Coudersport,” he said. “When we came up with this property swap which is just about foot-by-foot equal, I thought ‘there are too many pros to this not to support it.’”

The emergency petition is in the hands of a judge now. Wagner said he was hoping for a decision on the emergency injunction prior to Wednesday’s meeting of borough council.