EDISON – Hearings for a pair of 92,000-square-foot “flex” warehouses on Jackson Avenue began during an Edison Township Planning Board meeting during its regular July 14 meeting.
The project, enacted by the site’s owner Kaplan Cos., comes at the heels of an ordinance passed by the Township Council the previous week laying out zoning restrictions in the area as part of the township’s overall redevelopment effort in the area. The ordinance essentially restricted whatever project would be put up on the 11-acre tract of land to nonresidential, lighter flex uses, rather than a single, large warehouse, which would have been allowed had the ordinance not passed.
The buildings would cater primarily to small businesses that require storage spaces as a complement to their office space, such as mechanic shops, with the large buildings broken up into multiple smaller sections. They would be about 150 feet long, 25 feet wide and 30 feet high. At maximum, there will be 250 parking spaces, with a road running around and through the site. According to the planner hired by the owner, F. Mitchell Ardman, the site’s storm-water management plan, which uses a pair of detention basins, will reduce the overall runoff that current comes off the site. The state Department of Environmental Protection has also approved the owner’s remediation plan to address soil contamination at the site. A small loading area on the east side will be the only place that will be able to service large tractor-trailers; the rest of the building is geared more for smaller shipping vehicles, such as box trucks.
According to the firm’s traffic engineer, Harold Maltz, the project will have a small impact on traffic. During morning peak hours, the development will add 129 cars to the ones already on the road, or about 7 percent. The evening peak hours would see about 100 additional cars from the projects, also about 7 percent. Maltz said that the traffic impact would not require mitigation measures, such as adjusting traffic light timings. Acknowledging that traffic around the area, especially when schools, including one very nearby in the area, are opening and closing, could get very bad very quickly, he said that these periods only last about 15 minutes and that the vehicles coming from the Jackson Avenue site won’t contribute that much to those brief periods, because they would be more distributed over the course of the peak hours, rather than concentrated during that brief, intense period he talked about.
The developer’s original plan, as presented to members of the public during a series of community meetings over the past year, was for four smaller flex-space warehouses, built in phases. While the council was deliberating on the ordinance that would impose the zoning restrictions on the site, the plan had changed from four buildings to two, but still would be built in phases. The developer said that the four-building plan had only been conceptual to give people an idea of what could be built there, and that the market made larger buildings more viable than smaller ones.
During the meeting on July 14, it was revealed that the phasing aspect of the plan had also been dropped and that the applicant was looking to build both buildings at once. This caused some concern from members of the board, who had been hoping a school could be built on the property sometime between the first and second phase of the warehouses’ construction. Planning Board Chairman Dennis Pipala suggested making school construction a term of the application’s condition.
“I think we need to provide something that protects both the applicant and the township. This is a key issue in the entire application, and whatever resolved, it’s incumbent on us to put a condition of approval on it that covers the township, the Board of Education and the applicant so no one gets taken advantage of here and can get this resolved in whatever time it takes,” said Pipala.
The firm’s attorney, Steve Barcan, said that the applicant had waited for a firm decision from the district but felt that the schools had been taking too long, which was why the phasing element of the plan had been removed.
“We owned the property four years. This Board of Education has been talking to us for three and have not yet made a decision on that,” said Barcan. He added later that the last time his client and the district spoke was about two months ago.
He said that they would be willing to give the district 90 days to begin movements on some sort of ultimate decision, though some Planning Board members felt this might not be enough time, given that the district may be holding a referendum on a bond and thus may need to deal with new fiscal realities before addressing additional construction.
Board of Education member William Van Pelt said that the district was still concerned over reports of contamination in the area. The board member said that more discussion and testing would be necessary to see if the area is safe, noting that under the law, certain types of contamination would preclude a school being built there at all, even if the site were eventually cleaned up. He also said that he’d like to see more public meetings on the matter. Board Vice President Joe Romano had expressed similar sentiments in previous conversations with the Sentinel, but also added that 5 acres, the amount of land that would be ceded to the district, is also quite small for a school. Van Pelt suggested, perhaps, that a school could be built nearby and the site would be used for athletic fields, though he pointed out that nothing along that line of inquiry was official.
During the public comment portion, residents along the Jackson Avenue area voiced their concerns, mostly concerning traffic, safety and light pollution. Ardman, the planner, said that landscaping would prevent the light from bothering people who live there, with trees and shrubs blocking things. When asked whether changing the location of one of the driveways entirely was possible, it was said that this was an open question that could be further explored.
Another resident noted that people often park on the sides of the streets, meaning that traffic is probably worse than the study believes, since the parked cars make the streets more narrow. Adding trucks, even small trucks, to that mix, said one resident, made her concerned about safety.
“I definitely do not want trucks coming in and out of my house all day long,” said resident Lisa Ezama, before adding her worries about the safety of the nearby children.
Finally, Esther Nemitz, a regular at town meetings, expressed great concern and consternation over the firm’s changing its plans, most recently its elimination of phased planning.
“They have changed their mind faster than I change my socks; I don’t understand it,” said Nemitz.
She said that more time is needed in order to bring the district into the process, citing a dire need for more schools as a justification.
“Some people have made it sound like everything that has gone wrong has gone wrong because it’s the board’s fault. The rate at which these people have changed their minds doesn’t make it easy for anyone to know what’s going on … the point is, we have needs in this town and we need to attend to them and we need to do it in a diligent and rational fashion,” said Nemitz.
One of the owners, Jim Kaplan, responded to this by saying that it’s all in the Board of Education’s hands at this point, saying that the firm was open to discussions. But at the same time, he said that he felt it was unfair to tie the application’s approval to school construction.
“I find it unfair for tying this property with the school. We will continue this process, since it could be a useful thing for Edison Township to have that, but we cannot stop the process. We have designed this plan in a very flexible manner, so if the school decides to move at any point, we can adjust for whatever use they have and we will move forward,” said Kaplan.
Pipala, the board chairman, ended the meeting because it was getting late, and said that the public comment portion and the final vote would take place during a later Planning Board meeting, but he did not give a date for when that meeting would take place.