Testimony will continue on Millstone Center application Oct. 21
By alison granito
Staff Writer
MILLSTONE — Residents who spoke out at last week’s Zoning Board meeting had a clear message for the board and the applicant. They don’t want a supermarket in their neighborhood.
The applicant, Millstone Center Associates, has proposed a two-phase shopping center on a 9-acre site at the intersection of routes 526 and 571, known locally as Trenton-Lakewood Road and Millstone Road.
The anchor of the proposed shopping center would be a Foodtown supermarket, operated by Norkus Foodtown, which currently operates several area supermarkets, including the store in Freehold Township’s Raintree Center on Route 537, a store on Park Avenue in Freehold, and on Route 9 in Manalapan.
The site for the proposed shopping center is located in a Neighborhood Commercial (NC) Zone, which limits the floor size of commercial businesses to 4,000 square feet. The applicant testified that the supermarket in the shopping center would be approximately 35,000 square feet — a reduction from the site plan brought before the Zoning Board in June, which show a 40,000-square-foot supermarket.
Testimony at last week’s meeting focused on two points of contention — whether the shopping center would require a use variance, or merely a variance for the size of the business, and whether a supermarket was financially viable for the local area.
At the meeting, experts for the applicant testified that, since many of the uses permitted in the NC zone, such as a bakery, deli, or pharmacy, are what are proposed for inclusion in the supermarket, a use variance should not be required.
"If we had all of those separate in 4,000-square-foot modules, they would be permitted as a right in the Neighborhood Commercial Zone," Paul Phillips, New Brunswick-based planner retained by the applicant, said at the meeting.
Phillips said that the main difference between the NC and Highway Commercial (HC ) zones in the master plan was the size of businesses allowed to locate in each.
Phillips’ testimony and the testimony of other professionals hired by the applicant was often interrupted by angry outbursts from the crowd, lambasting the need for the supermarket and threatening a boycott if one is built.
Phillips said that the shopping center would "serve the day-to-day needs" of residents within a 3-mile radius of the site. The area served includes not only Millstone, but parts of neighboring Jackson, Upper Freehold and Freehold Township.
"The market support for a neighborhood-oriented supermarket is there," he added, citing consumer spending reports and census data within the target area.
Currently, supermarkets are a permitted use only in the township’s HC zones, which are located mainly along portions of Route 537 and Route 33.
"When they come into this town and tell us what they think is good for us, I get concerned," one Deer Tail Drive resident said during the public portion of the meeting.
George Cinque, who formerly sat on the Planning Board during the last master plan overhaul in 1997, said that the purpose of the NC zone was to preserve the feel of the neighborhood and "not allow for a Raintree to go on to that piece of property or any piece of property in Millstone Township."
"You can play words — is it a grocery store or a supermarket, but it was not our intent in ’97 to allow a large scale, 40,000-square-foot store here," he added.