The applicants proposing to build a Home Depot on the vacant Foodtown site, Route 70 and Brick Boulevard, are now officially the unwanted guests that refuse to leave the party.
The Township Council passed a unanimous resolution last week to initiate condemnation procedures against the property, and are on the verge of final passage of a $6 million bond ordinance to pay for the 11-acre tract. The council’s position is in line with the desires of a swelling body of residents who fear that run-off generated by the site would contaminate their drinking water source, neighboring Forge Pond.
Well before the application received its first public hearing, the Concerned Citizens of Brick formed to oppose the project, hiring an attorney to represent them on the matter. The Brick Township Municipal Utilities Authority is also being represented by an attorney at the hearings as an "interested party."
With all of this opposition, it is hard to imagine why the applicant, Preit Services, would want to go on with the project at all. It is telling that a simple redevelopment project, as Preit attorney John Giunco calls it, now requires a public relations consultant to be present at the Planning Board meetings.
Giunco spent last week telling anyone in Brick who would listen that they’d been had. The environmental concerns cited by opposition groups and interested parties is phony, and the council is buying into and advancing the myths without actually observing a hearing.
Giunco’s brash words were almost convincing, up to the point where he actually had to substantiate them at the hearing.
Giunco’s expert environmental witness, Dr. Brook Crossan, claimed it would take an inconceivable combination of meteorological events for run-off from the Home Depot to reach the BTMUA’s water-intake point 6,000 feet upstream. Crossan based this conclusion on his finding that there was no salinity in the area. We can conceive of such a scenario quite well since saltwater actually made its way upstream far enough last summer to warrant the BTMUA to shut off its pumps.
After some questioning by the various parties involved in the hearings, Crossan admitted he had little or no working knowledge of township land regulations or of the application itself. His thorough scientific research was based on only one day of observation, which featured good weather and was only two days before the hearing, so others had no chance to examine his report. Before long, Crossan admitted he was sorry he submitted his report at all.
The applicants’ claim that the plans have nothing to do with driving away the competition brought about by the new Lowe’s are laughable. If they are so convinced that Brick can financially sustain this new Home Depot, they can prove it by withdrawing their application and looking for another spot in town that is less environmentally sensitive.
The applicants should realize that they’re breeding resentment every day that will last beyond the unlikely moment when they receive plan approval and overturn the township’s condemnation, which is enormously difficult to do.