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A group of property owners trying to preserve a coastal anomaly known as the Avalon High Dunes has sued a Pennsylvania potato chip magnate, the borough and New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection in its latest effort to halt construction of the chip king's 14,000-square-foot beach mansion. At the same time, Utz Quality Foods president Michael Rice has sued Avalon for denying his application to add one more luxurious amenity to his Dune Drive property - a large swimming pool.

The site where Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting is building a new meetinghouse was damaged by arsonists during Christmas week, and police are now "absolutely" sure the attack was the result of a dispute between members of a Philadelphia construction union and the project's nonunion contractor. Although no suspects have been identified in the Dec. 21 incident, Lt. George McClay of Northwest Detectives said Friday that he was certain the small Quaker building on East Mermaid Lane was targeted because it is being built with nonunion labor.

Tenet Healthcare Corp. has approached Cancer Treatment Centers of America through an intermediary about buying Tenet's former Parkview Hospital property. Tenet, of Santa Barbara, Calif., closed the 200-bed hospital in September after failing to find a buyer for the money-losing institution north of Juniata Park. Cancer Treatment Centers, which is based in suburban Chicago, confirmed that it was considering the Parkview site yesterday for a possible East Coast expansion. "We have been approached with the Parkview opportunity," said Jack Moore, chief marketing officer for Cancer Treatment Centers.

Environmental officials are cleaning up an underground fuel spill on the grounds of the former Nike missile base in Warrington. An undetermined amount of diesel fuel, once used to heat buildings on the 16-acre site, seeped from three tanks on the property at Bradley and Folly Roads, according to Lawrence Piazza, project engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers. The leakage was discovered last Thursday during excavation on the property, he said. Ground-water monitors have been placed throughout the site and there have been no reports of contamination of nearby private wells, Piazza said.

County officials are preparing to spend more than $19,000 to complete what they call the final transformation of the former Thiokol Chemical Corp. site in Bristol Township into a park and business complex. The work, expected to end by June, includes the removal of five gasoline tanks, 13 electrical transformers and two 55-gallon drums dumped on the site. "This is the end of all known contaminant problems" at Thiokol, said Charles H. Steinbach, county operations director. However, he said the county has hired Carroll Engineering to search for toxic material in case any is left.

The state last week gave formal approval to a site on Route 30 for a consolidated Chester County welfare office. David Lapan, a spokesman for the state Department of Public Welfare, said that a senior aide would visit the site soon to make sure it is the best available location, but that otherwise state action was complete. Lapan said the department was making the last-minute inspection because most of the details of the move had been negotiated by the Casey administration.

A group of Eastern High School students asked the Voorhees Township Committee last night to stop the development of the Golf Farm, a well-known miniature and chip-and-putt golf course on Haddonfield-Berlin Road. Armed with green "Save the Golf Farm" fliers, the students presented petitions with 2,100 signatures asking the township to buy the Golf Farm and to conserve the township's dwindling reserve of open space. "We're concerned about the building up of Voorhees," said Jennifer Picciotti, a spokeswoman for the students.

Pilot Freight Services Inc. said today it will open a shipping station in Amsterdam, its first company-owned location in Europe. Pilot, of Lima, Delaware County, said the expansion results from a 60 increase in its international business last year compared with 2009. The new transportation center will service customers in Europe and Asia.    -Paul Schweizer

Township officials will begin to advertise for a master planner for the Haverford State Hospital site within the next two weeks, Township Manager Thomas J. Bannar said Friday. Local officials met with state officials in Harrisburg Thursday to review the township's request for proposals to hire a planner - and got their approval the same day. "They really want us to move ahead quickly on this," said Mary March, the First Ward commissioner, who chairs the township hospital site steering committee.

Don't think of this as a setback, city officials are saying, but it's hard to imagine skateboarders will see it any other way. On Wednesday, the Fairmount Park Commission tabled Mayor Street's idea for a new skatepark site on two acres along the Schuylkill below the Art Museum. This is the same commission, as you may recall, that OKd Mayor's Street's rush redo of Center City's LOVE Park - a project that will add nice greenery but also wipe out LOVE's standing as a skateboarding mecca, albeit an illegal one. So that's why this all sounds like a setback to skaters.