The Franklin Reporter & Advocate Eight Villages, One Community
The Environmental Commission on October 16 decided to recommend that the Township Zoning Board of Adjustment not approve an application for a warehouse at Weston Canal and Cottontail roads.
The application, submitted by Somerset Properties Realty, calls for a 61,000-square-foot warehouse on a roughly 5-acre plot fronting Cottontail Lane.
Plans call for 38 parking spaces, seven loading docks and two drive-in ramps.
The warehouse would be next to another of Somerset Properties’ warehouses, a 79,000-square-foot building for which the company received Planning Board approval in 2008 and 2018.
The hitch in this application is that the targeted land lies in the Business and Industry zone, from which the Township Council earlier this year removed warehouses as a permitted use. That forced the developer to apply to the Zoning Board for a use variance, as well as subdivision and other approvals.
The land on which the current warehouse sits and the proposed warehouse is sited was once two separate parcels. Approval for the current warehouse was contingent on a Delaware and Raritan Canal Commission requirement that the two lots be merged, and that that the Commission be granted a conservation easement.
Somerset Properties will also have to apply to the DRCC for relief from the requirement that the two parcels be consolidated, and that the conservation easement be transferred to another site.
Commission members said at their October 16 meeting that there was a reason warehouses were removed as permitted used from the B-I zone.
“The point of changing the zoning is that we don’t want any more warehouses,” Commissioner Robin Suydam said.
Commenting on the proposal to remove 121 trees and replace them with 21 trees and a contribution to the Township’s shade tree trust fund, Suydam said, “It’s an area where we’ve already sacrificed too many tees.”
A hearing date for the application could not be readily obtained.
