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A familiar face has joined the Board of Supervisors. Richard Roller, the chairman of the Planning Commission, has been selected to replace Charles Holl, who resigned last week. Roller, 46, was sworn in during a meeting Monday, moments after the board announced Holl's resignation. Holl, 73, resigned for health reasons. He had served for 11 years. Roller will serve the remaining 10 months of Holl's six-year term and also will seek the post as a Republican candidate in the May 18 primary.

The people who would help make or break Philadelphia's proposed convention center are in town this week. They're not state legislators, not City Council members, not real-estate developers. They're meeting planners, the people who schedule conventions. A single planner often represents as many as a dozen trade groups. Their booking decisions will be crucial in determining the long-term success of the proposed Center City convention center. The city tourism bureau hosted a reception for a group of 500 meeting planners on the grounds of the historic First Bank building near 3rd and Chestnut streets Monday.

Preserving open space, an ongoing theme in Schuylkill Township, was the focus of discussion at a meeting Wednesday between Schuylkill officials and Chester County planners. For a year, at the township's behest, the county Planning Commission has been working on a comprehensive plan for Schuylkill. The plan will cover zoning and land development. Wednesday's meeting focused on a draft of the plan's 12th and final chapter, titled "plan implementation. " One significant method of preserving open space, the planners said, is "single-family cluster development.

The Lindenwold Board of Education has hired its first community-education coordinator. Susan M. Straub, who has 15 years of experience in education, including work as a music teacher and community music program organizer in several South Jersey communities, was hired at the board's Monday meeting for the 1987-88 school year. The board created the $27,500-a-year position earlier this year in response to a task-force study that indicated that borough residents wanted evening education programs for children and adults, Superintendent Edward W. Zirpoli said.

Mayor Street filled two more top level posts yesterday, recreation and planning. Street named New Orleans recreation director Victor Richard to head Philadelphia's rec department. The post, which will pay Richard $90,000 a year, had been filled by an acting head since the highly regarded Michael DiBerardinis left in January. In addition, Street named New York city planning official Maxine Griffith director of the city's planning commission, replacing 18-year director Barbara Kaplan, who announced her resignation two weeks ago. The Street team conducted a national search for a recreation commissioner, first offering the job to Houston recreation official Roy Wilson.

A North Philadelphia shopping center development is among the new projects approved recently by the City Planning Commission. The shopping center, which would feature a supermarket as the anchor, would be bounded by 5th, 6th, Berks and Norris streets. Cornel Pankey, the commission's community planner for North Philadelphia, said construction could begin in six to 18 months. The Redevelopment Authority would buy 99 properties with the intention of selling them to the Asociacion Puertorriquenos en Marcha, or Association of Puerto Ricans on the March, said Pankey.

The Conshohocken Planning Commission got its first glimpse of a tentative design for the Tower Bridge office and retail complex last week in reviewing a proposed network of roads. The plan - including eight development lots, 1.1 million square feet of office space and 450,000 square feet of retail space - elicited a two-word response from commission chairman George J. Rafferty: "Mind boggling. " Tower Bridge has been proposed by the Oliver Tyrone Pulver Corp. of Pittsburgh for about 42 acres along the north banks of the Schuylkill in the southern end of the borough.

Prompted by a criminal investigation of Planning Board Secretary Joseph Iuliucci, the Winslow Township Committee met behind closed doors last night to discuss a demand for his resignation and to consider drafting a code of ethics. The session was the first since Camden County Prosecutor Samuel Asbell said Monday that he would investigate reports that Iuliucci cleared the way for development of a 13.3-acre tract that he and a partner later sold for $100,000. After ending the closed portion of the meeting, committee members adopted a resolution saying the township would cooperate with Asbell's investigation.

After more than three hours of testimony before City Council's Committee on Transportation and Public Utilities, Council member Augusta Clark yesterday gave SEPTA a backhanded pardon. The issue was whether SEPTA allocates its operating subsidies between its regional rail and city transit divisions in a way that discriminates against the city commuters who use its buses, trolleys and subways. "I think there has not been equal distribution, but I could not say that it was unlawfully discriminatory based on what I heard today," Clark said after the hearing.

Chester County's top planner warned members of a northern Chester County conservation group not to relax their vigilance against rampaging development in the county. "Sustain the kind of things you've been doing," George W. Fasic urged members of the French and Pickering Creek Conservation Trust. Fasic, director of the Chester County Planning Commission, was speaking at the trust's annual meeting, held Wednesday night in the West Vincent Township Building. Fasic said groups such as the trust were needed as a counterbalance against "the development mode.