The Montclair Planning Board is scheduled to continue its review of the township’s Lackawanna Redevelopment Plan at its meeting tonight at 7:30 in the Municipal Building. The meeting will also be streamed on YouTube.
The Planning Board began its 60-day review of the plan on Dec. 12 with presentations from Keenan Hughes of Phillips Preiss Grygiel Leheny Hughes and Ira Smith of Smith Maran Architects, consultants involved in creating the draft of the plan.
Although last week’s Planning Board meeting was not a public hearing, it played out before an audience of silent protesters who held up signs saying, “Too Much,” “Scale It Down,” “Do Not Ruin This Town” and “Follow the Master Plan.”
The Planning Board’s role in this part of the redevelopment process is to determine whether the draft plan for the 8.2-acre Lackawanna Plaza site, which fronts on Bloomfield Avenue and straddles Grove Street, is consistent with the township’s master plan.
“If the board reviews the plan and finds that there are several issues, it will include those issues in its report back to the governing body,” Arthur Neiss, the Planning Board’s attorney, said referring to the Township Council. “Normally, we have 45 days to review a plan, but the governing body determined that the board should have 60 days in order to determine the consistency of the plan with the master plan.”
The redevelopment plan calls for construction of five buildings on the site owned by David Placek’s BDP Holdings. The buildings would be either five or six stories and would house a maximum of 375 residential units, 75,000 square feet of office space and a new supermarket. Three plazas totaling 72,000 square feet would be dedicated as public open spaces.
One of the central features of the plan is that it requires that a supermarket be included in the development. The Fourth Ward has been without a supermarket since 2015, when the Pathmark store at Lackawanna Plaza closed.
A number of Montclair residents have criticized the plan because of the height of the buildings and the number of residential units. Some have questioned whether the number of parking spaces will be adequate. And concerns have been raised about how the development would affect traffic in the immediate area and the surrounding neighborhoods.