Town square hearing draws huge crowd
Applicant is seeking
a variance to use
part of an adjacent industrial zone
VERONICA YANKOWSKI Stacy Matulewicz can barely listen to any more information during the Middletown Zoning Board’s first meeting Thursday on plans for a Middletown town center on Route 35 north and Kings Highway East. In anticipation of a huge crowd, the meeting was held at Middletown High School South.
MIDDLETOWN — Feuding factions of red and green were poised and ready to plead their cases. They were told: Town center or town square, it’s not the name of the development that matters to the township’s Zoning Board, it’s the place.
With hearings starting at a special Zoning Board meeting on March 21, a crowd of about 300 gathered in Middletown High School South’s auditorium to hear developer Mountain Hill’s case explaining why a portion of their proposed town center-type development should be allowed in a light industrial (M-1) zone. Mountain Hill, LLC, is headed by former school board member Philip Scaduto and Joseph Azzolina Jr., son of the assemblyman in District 13. The Azzolinas and Scadutos own a chain of Foodtown supermarkets and are lifelong Middletown residents.
More than a year ago, Mountain Hill announced its conceptual plans to build a $150 million, some 1.7-million-square-foot town center. The concept has been wrought with controversy since its inception.
Any event that has brought the issue to light has inspired a Hatfield and McCoy-type entourage. March 21 was no exception. Before the hearing, pro-center people gathered outside donning green T-shirts with a pro-center message. Opponents, or Concerned Citizens of Middletown, wore red.
Opponents of the proposed town center, who were encouraged to wear red, brought signs like this to the meeting. Supporters, who have been encouraged to wear green, were greeted with sandwiches, beverages and chips, compliments of the applicant, Mountain Hill, LLC. All were welcome to the refreshments, Joseph Azzolina said.
At a glance, there was more green to be seen than red. Though those representing the factions against the development maintained that many who were there wearing green either were not Middletown residents or were union workers for the developer’s supermarket chain.
The developer offered submarine sandwiches, beverages and chips, which township Planning Director Anthony Mercantante said they "probably really shouldn’t have on the premises" of the school for an official meeting. However, in a later interview, Assemblyman Joseph Azzolina, former owner of the town center property and father to one of the Mountain Hill principals, said the sustenance was a simple measure "to feed the people who didn’t have a chance to get something to eat and were coming directly from work. The opponents were welcome to the food, too," he added.
Food aside, the purpose of the meeting was to get on with the business of whether planned development uses should be allowed in a light industrial zone. In order for the center — slated to extend along Route 35 north from Kings Highway East to Kanes Lane — to comprise the full 137.5 acres the developer wants it to encompass, a use variance is required. The planned development zone, which allows for such a mixed-use type development, includes 85 acres of the proposed 137.5-acre site. The other 52 acres along Kanes Lane is zoned light industrial, and the developer is asking the township to extend parameters of that zone to allow for all of the uses permitted in the planned development zone.
As the hearing began, Zoning Board Chairman John Hinckley reminded the crowd that "The (Zoning) Board of Adjustment is a quasi-judicial body, which hears requests for relief from zoning regulations. Under the law, any owner or contract purchaser may apply for such relief to the board. It’s up to the applicant to prove that such relief is warranted and prove it by weight of evidence."
He further explained that there would be presentation of the case and expert testimony, after which, the board and the public would be allowed to direct questions to the testimony at hand, nothing else.
During the three-hour hearing, Mountain Hill’s attorney, Gary Fox of Fox and Gemma, Ocean Township, stated that the applicant needs the variance to put uses in the light industrial zone that are currently not allowed: part of a department store, four single-family homes and apartments. "We want to apply one set of standards to one zone," said Fox, specifying that he thought the uses the applicant wants to bring to the industrial portion of the site will be more amenable to neighbors. He added that if the variance is turned down, the applicant will still develop all 137.5 acres.
Fox then turned testimony over to the first and only expert witness of the evening, Herbert Simmens, of Princeton, former executive director of the New Jersey State Planning Commission and present independent consultant to Mountain Hill.
The crux of Simmens’ testimony was that by granting the variance, the board would be complying with state and township master plan ideals, which view town center-type development as smart growth, as opposed to suburban sprawl. With a slide show projection of a PowerPoint presentation, Simmens went over the history of Middletown’s growth, its master plan of 1992 and noted that "town centers were advocated …"
Simmens continued that higher up on the state level, "the state (master) plan is a blueprint for smart growth, not no growth," which a town center development advocates. He elaborated that the "basic principle of a state plan is to direct and redirect as much development into centers as possible."
Members of the board received copies of the PowerPoint presentation in binders over the objections of attorney Ron Gasiorowski, representing Heritage Hills Homeowners Association (comprised of Concerned Citizens against the development), who said his clients should have been provided with the same reports 10 days in advance in preparation for cross-examination.
Zoning Board Attorney Gregory Vella said that the binders did not contain "reports, but were basically pictures." Gasiorowski reserved the right to backtrack and question the witness at a later date, when reports were available.
Criticized in the past by the Concerned Citizens group for its potential to generate an inordinate amount of traffic, Simmens called the town center design one which was formulated to generate pedestrian traffic, not vehicles.
The zoning board will be hiring traffic, engineering and planning professionals to review the application. Still, minus the questions of those professionals, Sim-mens said that the smart growth concept that is the town center idea is one which encourages people to drive to a single hub for a variety of activities: shopping, dining,