HOWELL – The members of the Howell Zoning Board of Adjustment have approved an application that proposed the construction of 17 homes on Cloverhill Lane.
Cloverhill Lane is off Asbury Avenue at the border of Howell and Freehold Township.
Zoning board Chairman Wendell Nanson and board members Paul Sayah, Richard Mertens, Glenn Cantor, Matthew Hughes, James Moretti Jr. and Jose Orozco voted “yes” on a motion to approve the application at the board’s June 14 meeting.
Gross & Gross Associates, LLC, the applicant and owner, was seeking final major subdivision approval to subdivide the 41-acre site into 20 lots (17 homes; one lot for an existing home; and two lots for storm water management facilities).
Attorney Salvatore Alfieri and engineer Michael Geller represented the application at the meeting.
Alfieri said the application received preliminary approval in 2015. Since that time, the applicant has reviewed reports and recommendations from the zoning board’s professional planner and engineer.
Geller said no changes had been made to the lot count, the road configuration or the lot configuration. He said the property is in Howell’s Agricultural Rural Estate-2 zone. There are freshwater wetlands at two locations on the tract.
Geller said the property “received preliminary and major subdivision approval from the Planning Board in February 2015, and final approval in April 2015, to subdivide the site exactly as you see it.
“The approvals were granted on zoning parameters for ARE-1, which is a 40,000-square-foot (1-acre) zone that was in existence at the time,” he said.
Geller said the property was later changed to an ARE-2 (2-acre) zone which requires … a minimum of 200 feet of width.
He said the applicant was then required to go before the zoning board to seek a variance because the lot sizes were all smaller than the 2-acre requirement.
The applicant received preliminary major subdivision approval with a variance in December 2015 and has since had several extensions of time.
The homes will have access off Cloverhill Lane and the proposed development has been divided into three sections, each of which will have a storm water management basin.
Nanson praised the professionals who worked on the Gross & Gross Associates project – representing the applicant and the zoning board – for the efforts they made on the application.