The Franklin Reporter & Advocate Eight Villages, One Community
For the second consecutive meeting, a developer who wants to build a mixed-use retail center across from the Somerset Run housing development was told by the Planning Board on September 3 to rethink its plan.
NPH Real Estate last appeared before the Board in May with its plans to build a a one-story, 4,690-square-foot building and a two-story, 21,374-square-foot building at the intersection of Davidson Avenue and New Brunswick Road.
The plans have been slightly modified, the two-story building is now 20,050 square feet, while the one-story building’s size remains the same.
The developer is seeking site plan approval and relief from the Township’s parking lot requirements.
The one-story building would be strictly retail, while the two-story building would house the developer’s accounting business on its second floor.
As they had in May, Board members expressed displeasure with the developer’s plan to construct the buildings one behind the other, facing New Brunswick Road. Some Board members wondered aloud at the September 3 meeting, as they had in May, why the project couldn’t be built in an “L” shape.
The developer’s engineer, Shri Kotdawla, told the Board that he had moved the development 10 feet further away from the road and increased vegetation to help screen the center from New Brunswick Road.
Even with the changes, Board Chairman Michael Orsini said he didn’t “know that you fully took the board’s suggestions from the last time.”
Orsini asked Mark Healey, the Township’s Planner, if he thought the design of this proposed retail center could match the design standards – albeit on a smaller scale – of the shopping centers further along Old New Brunswick and Schoolhouse roads.
Healey said that was hard to answer, mainly because the property is smaller. Providing more buffering, he said, would reduce the number of available parking spots.
“Could there be a larger buffer? I mean, there certainly could, but there’s going to be a kind of a push and pull between, you know, what the applicant is intending as far as the size of the buildings and the square footage, the need to have at least adequate parking,” Healey said.
“So what’s the right solution?” he said. “I can’t really answer that necessarily for the board. If they were to reduce the amount of square footage, then that reduces the parking demand and then there’s less of an issue on the parking side. Again, there’s a lot of things, Mr. Chair, that kind of fight against each other and some of the things like the applicant’s desire for this property, I can’t address that.”
“Well, I don’t have a protractor, but it seems to me that a lot of this could be solved if you take that single-story building and you flip it, make the site layout more of an “L”, you still get your parking, but now your parking comes in from New Brunswick Road,” Orsini said. “Your buffer that looks quite ample between New Brunswick Road and the two-story mixed-use building now can be done because you push the parking in. I don’t know if you literally flip that building and create like a breezeway or a walkway between the two buildings if you don’t want to connect them physically.”
“I know that was what we asked you to consider the last time … and you did shrink the buildings and again, you took a little of the advice, but I think that the biggest thing would be to sort of like make it like an L-shape and that way you still get your parking in there,” he said.
Board member Robert Thomas said he didn’t know why the applicant had an “aversion” to experimenting with an “l”-shaped design.
“I think you could solve a lot of problems with that,” he said. “That was a suggestion last time too, and it seems to have disappeared.”
As far as visibility of the center is concerned, Thomas said that most of the people who drive by the location are what he called “habitual traffic.”
“You’re not attracting tourists,” he said. “You’re not attracting people traveling generally from one town to another. This is an area where a lot of people are Somerset Run. A lot of people are going to the high school. A lot of people are going to the businesses that are directly around there where the particular residence is.”
“You change the retail building as part of the L-shape, I think you would still have enough visibility,” he said. “People will see what’s there. You’re going to have a sign up there. Nobody can see ShopRite from New Brunswick Road or Davidson Avenue, but people sure know how to find it.”
In the end, it was decided that Orsini, Healey and Darren Mazzei, the Board’s engineer, would meet and sketch out a plan they think would be suitable, and then Healey would present that to the applicant.
“I’m happy to do whatever you think will help, Mark, because I know you understand what we’re getting at, and I think that’s kind of, again, the advice that we gave the applicant the last time,” Orsini said. “And again, it’s not like they ignored us, it’s just that maybe the biggest thing that could probably take care of a lot of problems with one fell swoop is just rejiggering the site.”
The application is scheduled to next be heard on November 5.
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