The Franklin Reporter & Advocate Eight Villages, One Community
The Township cannot legally outright ban future warehouse development in Franklin, but officials hope actions that are planned for the next few months will give planners more control over where they are located and how large they can be, with a ban on warehouses of more than 400,000 square feet.
That process is coming to a head, with the review of a Master Plan Reexamination Report and proposed zoning ordinance changes to the Township’s Business-Industry Zone, affecting light industry in general and warehouses in particular, at the Planning Board’s March 26 meeting.
The report and proposed ordinance amendment are the result of more than two years of studies and public meetings, including the use of an ad-hoc committee comprised of residents and Township officials.
The intended result is to confine light- and medium- use warehouses to certain parts of the BI Zone – away from residential areas – and to totally prohibit the construction of high-intensity warehouses.
The Township Council in 2023 passed an ordinance amendment that stripped any mention of warehouses from Franklin’s zoning documents. That removed the permitted and conditional use status from warehouses, and forced developers to go to the Zoning Board of Adjustment for a use variance.
But that, said Mark Healey, the Township’s Principal Planner, could be improved upon.
“Right now, it’s a blank slate,” Healey told the Planning Board. “Somebody comes in, wants to build a warehouse. There are no standards. So, what do they do? They can go to the Zoning Board and there’s nothing in the Master Plan that says what we want, what we don’t want.”
“We’re basically telling the development community, this is what’s acceptable, this is what’s not,” he said. “It not only directs the applications in terms of telling them if they want to be a permitted use, go to the Panning Board. You have to abide by these standards.”
“Even if we have use variances or conditional use standards, now they have to go to the Zoning Board,” Healey said. “We have the Master Pan that talks about why we wanted these types of warehouses directed to these different areas. And the applicant has to justify why they’re doing something that’s contrary to the Master Plan.”
“That gives the community, I think, a lot more direction, a lot more power or control over this issue than, frankly, putting their heads in the sand and not addressing it,” he said.
The ordinance separates warehouses into three groups: Low Intensity Light Industrial, which is a warehouse measuring up to 150,000 square feet and having fewer than one loading dock per 10,000 square feet; Medium Intensity Light Industrial, which is a warehouse measuring between 150,000 and 400,000 square feet and having fewer than one loading dock per 5,000 square feet, and High Intensity Light Industrial, which is a warehouse measuring more than 400,000 square feet, or having more than one loading dock per 5,000 square feet.
High Intensity warehouses tend to be used as fulfillment centers or delivery hubs.
The latter of the three would be outright banned, while the other two would be conditional uses, according to the ordinance.
Under the proposed ordinance, medium-intensity uses must be located within one mile of an Interstate Route 287 interchange, with access along non-residential roads. Light-intensity uses would be allowed anywhere in the BI Zone.
Frontage on scenic roads would be prohibited.
Warehouses that would be located near residential areas would have to provide a minimum landscape buffer of 100 feet in width, a minimum building setback of 200 feet. Loading or service areas would not be allowed to face residential zones or a public street.
Also weighing heavily in the deliberations over warehouse placement was the condition of 14 road intersections in the BI zone
Dave Roberts, an engineer with Brightview Engineering – the firm that was contracted to do a traffic study of the BI zone as well as study other factors relating to warehouse development – told the Board that when traffic calculations of current and future warehouse development were made, “about maybe a half a dozen intersections where if there wasn’t a failing turning movement based on today’s traffic, there would be.”
“And generally, there wasn’t much difference between the partial build-out, which would have been the applications that had been approved that not yet have been built, and the full build-out, which would have been all of the sites assumedly being improved with warehouses,” he said. “The only difference really was that the waiting time just got worse. So there’s clearly intersection issues that are going to get worse as these sites develop.”
“There are recommendations as part of that traffic study as to some things that can be done to mitigate some of those issues over time, despite what happens with the land use applications,” he said.
The Planning Board will hold a public hearing on the Master Plan Reexamination Report in April.
After that, the Township Council will introduce the ordinance amendments, then hold a public hearing a month after introduction, after it has been referred back to the Planning Board.
The final step would be adoption of the Master Plan Reexamination Report by the Board.
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