At full buildout, 5000-6000 workers expected
By:John Tredrea
Bristol-Myers Squibb (B-MS) has begun talks with the Hopewell Township Planning Board on a proposed near-tripling of the size of the pharmaceutical firm’s office-research complex, located on 433 acres in the east-central township off Pennington-Rocky Hill and Titus Mill roads.
B-MS, which purchased the complex from Mobil three years ago, has 1 million square feet of office-research space now and proposes adding 1.8 million square feet more. That amount is in conformity with the terms of the General Development Plan (GDP) Mobil obtained for the site from township government 10 years ago. Under the terms of the GDP, all rights and obligations of which are now held by B-MS, additional township approvals will be needed on such issues as water quality and environmental impact before the B-MS facility can be expanded.
The GDP approval is good for 20 years, expiring in 2010. GDPs are closely regulated by New Jersey’s Municipal Land Use Law (MLUL).
Inevitably, the proposed B-MS expansion would increase dramatically the traffic impact of the complex. There are 1,600 employees at the complex already. At full buildout, 5,000-6,000 are expected. “We’ll work with the township to mitigate the traffic issue,” said Lou Fedele, director of facilities for B-MS at its Hopewell Township site.
Under the terms of the GDP approval acquired by Mobil in 1990, Mobil agreed to pay a pro rata share of improvements to roads and intersections near the office research complex. The improvements would be geared toward helping those roads and intersections handle the new traffic the expansion of the complex would bring. The obligation to help pay for those improvements still applies to B-MS under the GDP approval it acquired when it purchased its Hopewell Township site three years ago.
Mr. Fedele said his firm’s expansion proposal for the site is much more environmentally-friendly than expansion plans in the Mobil GDP the township approved in 1990.
Mr. Fedele said B-MS wants to do all its new construction inside a perimeter fence that encloses the 180-acre portion of the tract on which all construction to date has been done.
“In contrast, Mobil’s proposal was to build two large buildings, totaling 675,000 square feet, and three large parking decks” outside the perimeter fence and on a 200-acre working farm on the B-MS site, Mr. Fedele said. “If what Mobil proposed had been built, 40 percent of the area of the farm would have been covered with new construction that would have been visible from the roadway. What we’re proposing would have no impact on the farm. Everything we’ll build would be clustered around existing buildings, inside the loop road. There is about 5 percent less cover of impervious surface in our plan than in Mobil’s. Also, because the buildings are smaller in our plan than in what Mobil proposed, the site will grow more slowly under our plan than it would have under theirs.” The slower rate of growth will serve to cushion the traffic impact of the expansion, Mr. Fedele said.
Mr. Fedele said B-MS may propose construction of several five-story buildings at the complex, at which the tallest existing structures are four-stories high. He said the five-story buildings would be located in the portion of the complex furthest from public roads. “They’ll be about 1,500 feet from Titus Mill Road,” he said. Asked if those buildings would be able to be seen from outside the complex, Mr. Fedele said “the fifth floor, or a portion of it might be able to seen.” B-MS is investigating this issue further with computer-generated studies, he added.
Although B-MS has not yet filed a formal application with the township Planning Board on its expansion plans, representatives of the pharmaceutical firm met with the board May 23 to begin discussing them.
“They presented their ideas to us and stated they wanted to enter into a collaborative process with the board,” Township Planning Board chairman Michael Aucott said of B-MS. “Several members of the board and residents of the community expressed concern on a number of issues, including the height of the buildings, traffic and water resources.” Mr. Aucott added that adoption of a new township ordinance might be needed to enable B-MS to build structures five stories high.
The B-MS complex gets water from its own wells. The complex also has an on-site sewage treatment facility. This set-up would continue if the expansion as currently proposed goes through.
Marybeth Koza, B-MS’s director of environmental affairs, said “by maintaining the farmland (in contrast to the Mobil plan), we increase the acquirer recharge. By reducing the impervious cover, we reduce the non-point source pollution.”
A key factor, Ms. Koza added, is that under the B-MS proposal, 60 percent of the complex’s wastewater “will be recycled. After going through our sewage treatment plant, that 60 percent will be used for fire protection, HVAC (heating/ventilation/air-conditioning), which uses a lot of water, and irrigation. All the water that runs off impervious surface will go to a pond and wastewater system to be cleaned.”
Ms. Koza added that, because of this amount of recycling, the amount of treated wastewater discharged into Stony Brook from the B-MS site after full build-out would not increase over what is discharged now.