BY JANE MEGGITT
Staff Writer
UPPER FREEHOLD – An ordinance passed in December 2005 received some flack at the last Township Committee meeting.
Members of the public and the governing body had criticisms of the township’s facade ordinance at the April 5 meeting. The previous night, owners of the proposed Kiddie Academy in the Cox’s Corner commercial subdivision on Route 524 told the township’s Economic Development Committee (EDC) that the facade ordinance caused them to make “significant structural changes” to their building plans, costing them a large amount of money.
Doug Walsh, the developer of the Cox’s Corner project, said he sent the Township Committee numerous references to problems in the ordinance.
“The Kiddie Academy owners have just completed their purchase of the lot, and they had to spend an exorbitant amount of money to meet the requirements of the ordinance,” he said.
He continued, “There are illegal components of the ordinance I brought to the attention of the committee.”
Walsh said commercial development is “on the doorstep” of the township. He said the town does not need another conflict with such development.
Mayor Stephen Fleischacker said that while he understands the arguments against the facade ordinance, he wants advice from the EDC on whether it thinks the ordinance is hurting businesses.
“They are an advisory board, and their function is to promote business,” he said.
Deputy Mayor William Miscoski disagreed with Fleischacker.
“We don’t need a report from the EDC,” he said, calling the facade ordinance “wrong” and “bad.”
Miscoski said that he and former township Committeeman David Horsnall had also brought up problems with the ordinance.
Miscoski said the ordinance requires every building to be a certain height.
“Dave Horsnall and I thought that was ridiculous,” he said.
Township Attorney Granville Michael Magee said he was never asked to review the ordinance.
At the Dec. 1, 2005, meeting – which was when the facade ordinance was passed – Walsh told the Township Committee that he and then-Mayor Sal Diecidue had reviewed areas in the proposed draft of the ordinance that he thought could hurt the town.
At the time, Walsh said, “I was quite surprised to see that the revised guidelines were the same as the initial [ones].”
Walsh had noted that the ordinance requires new construction to appear to have the same number of stories, and a building height within 2 feet above- or below-average height. He also noted that the ordinance required the proportion of new construction to be comparable to adjacent buildings.
Walsh said Kiddie Academy is the first building approved for Cox’s Corner.
“This building is one story and approximately 10,000 square feet,” Walsh said. “Since there are no commercial buildings at this site, this will be the benchmark for future buildings.”
A February 2006 letter to the township from Walsh’s attorney, Mark Williams, called the facade ordinance “invalid” because the township does not have the power to adopt such an ordinance and the Planning Board has no power to enforce it. Williams argued that a municipality’s power to adopt a site plan ordinance comes from the New Jersey Municipal Land Use Law (MLUL) and that the power to regulate architecture does not exist in the MLUL.
Williams wrote, “The actual regulations in the new ordinance are a maze of technical twists and turns, certain to produce innumerable differences of opinion, hours of useless discussion, frustration to all parties concerned, and, if they are actually obeyed out of exhaustion, the end of creative architectural expression within Upper Freehold Township.”
The letter continued, “In the end – and without reference to the remaining commercial land in the township – my clients and their successors will not be able to comply with this ordinance. The township will end up defending it in court.
“The parties will waste time and money,” Williams further wrote. “The ordinance will be invalidated, and life will go on.”