By Frank Mustac, Contributor
Planning Board members recently discussed the next steps in the municipality’s ongoing redevelopment process, now that the Borough Council has officially designated a number of properties in town as “areas in need of redevelopment.”
The properties in question are divided into three areas:
Area A includes properties fronting on Railroad Place and Somerset Street.
Area B includes three parcels in common ownership with frontage on East Broad Street, Maple Street and Columbia Avenue.
Area C includes the Van Doren Lumber Yard at 24 Model Ave.
During the Dec. 7 Planning Board meeting, board member David Mackie, who also serves on the on the Hopewell Borough Council, said that council members meeting in November concurred “that there was no compelling need, necessarily, to initiate redevelopment plans for areas A, B and C right away.”
“You could go down that path of producing a redevelopment plan for particular parcels right now, or wait some years,” he said. “You could (also) wait until you have a property owner who approaches the borough and would like to go down that path.”
“We have two property owners who have specifically requested to participate in the redevelopment process. The thought was to begin with those properties,” Mr. Mackie said.
The pair of properties he was referring to are the Van Doren Lumber Yard and the Hopewell 57 building property on Lafayette Street.
Designating an area in need of redevelopment, as stipulated under the state’s Local Redevelopment and Housing Law, can provide incentives for landowners to update buildings and facilities on their properties if those properties meet certain requirements.
Some of the requirements are that buildings on a property be in a state of disrepair; facilities on those properties are old and out of date; and buildings and other structures on a property have been destroyed by fire or other natural calamities.
Mr. Mackie said there was a discussion among Borough Council members “about the nature of redevelopment plans and the notion that you can be as flexible or as prescriptive as the community decides they want to be.”
“The idea is that (redevelopment) is really an opportunity to reexamine those particular potential future uses in a more positive and inclusive way, and productive way,” he said, explaining that redevelopment could also “incorporate historic preservation, environmental and aesthetic concerns — all of those things.”
“It’s really more a matter of providing an opportunity to use the assets that we have well,” he said.
The Planning Board’s professional planner, Joanna Slagle of Banisch Associates in Flemington, described some of the possible next steps for the board, one of which is to take the two properties that have been identified as the priority subject areas — the lumber yard and Hopewell 57 — and work on redevelopment plans for them.
“Now, obviously those two properties are very different, so the redevelopment plans for those would be two separate planning documents,” she said. “What is going to work on one place is not necessarily going to work on the other.”
A redevelopment plan, she said, essentially contains a combination of a Master Plan element and the regulatory action of a zoning ordinance in one document.
“I think that the goal here is to create basically an overlay zone so that your underlying zoning remains the same. But should a redeveloper come in and want to trigger that redevelopment ordinance, that would be their guiding document,” Ms. Slagle said. “They would have to adhere to the overlay zoning requirements.”
“That would allow existing property owners to continue what they’re doing and not have to make any changes. But for those property owners who want to do something (different), it gives them a new set of guidelines.”
