The proposed Lackawanna Plaza Redevelopment Plan, which includes housing, commercial and office space, retail, and a long-awaited supermarket, is inconsistent with Montclair’s Master Plan, the document that regulates development within the Township, the Planning Board said.
By a vote of 7-1, the Board on Monday evening voted to recommend to the Township Council that the redevelopment proposal, in its current form, isn’t in line with Montclair’s stated goals regarding appropriate growth.
The Planning Board also voted to empower board member Carmel Loughman, who had prepared the notes for the evening’s discussion, to draft correspondence to the Township Council expressing their recommendations and reservations. The Council had asked the Planning Board to weigh in as the municipality’s land-use authority.
Board Chair John Wynn reminded the board of their assignment. “I think we owe it to the Council to tell, ‘here’s where we think it complies, here’s where we think it doesn’t comply,” he said. And, he concluded, “it doesn’t comply with the Master Plan in substantial sections.”
A board subcommittee was tasked with creating a presentation on the plan for the rest of the board. That informal report concentrated on the building height, traffic mitigation, parking, supermarket size, and quality of the open space, said Loughman, who penned the draft.
For more than 3 ½ hours, the board discussed the plan and, at various times, agreed and disagreed with each other. At one point, the meeting veered into heated language between Board Chair John Wynn and Director of Planning Janice Talley, who locked horns about the need for more detailed renderings so the board could properly understand the amount of proposed open space and if it fulfills the township’s requirements.
Two residents who attended the meeting held up signs stating “Scale It Down” and “Follow the Master Plan” at various times during the meeting.
Director of Planning Janice Talley told the board that the biggest change in the revised plan is the number of housing units reduced to 300 from 375.
The revised Redevelopment Plan made changes to five of the buildings, she said. The plan shows that three buildings were reduced in height by a story each.
Building A was slightly redesigned to increase the setback from the historic waiting room and added an upper-story setback, Talley said. The top floor of Building B was pushed back from Glenridge Avenue, which camouflages the height of the building from the street, she said.
The footprint of Building C was flipped 90 degrees to change the orientation of the setbacks, which now face the plaza instead of Grove Street. This “helps to open up the view of the historic waiting room,” Talley told the board.
A corner of Building D, which faces Glenridge Avenue, has been sliced off to create additional open space, the plan shows. Additionally, the height of that building decreased to 67 feet from 77 feet and will now be five stories instead of six, Talley said. The height of Building E was reduced to 60 feet from 75 feet and will also be five stories instead of six, the plan shows.
The number of short-term rental units was reduced to 10 percent from 15 percent of the number of market-rate residential units, she said.
Many board members expressed their concerns and deep reservations about the proposed redevelopment.
“The buildings that are being proposed, some of them are double the size of the surrounding buildings,” Loughman said. “How is this in conformance with the Master Plan, which says we don’t want to change the character of the area.”
Board member Jeffrey Jacobson said there are too many proposed parking spaces. The 840 proposed spaces are “more than double the size of the Midtown parking deck,” he said. “Which is space that can’t be used for people.” The Council should explain to residents how they will provide for that number of spots, “or you got to dial back the [building] heights,” he said.
And while Jacobson said he wasn’t concerned about the plan for a supermarket since it’s not coming for five years and plans could change by then, board member Anthony Ianuale was concerned about the size of a proposed grocery store, “and we should at least give the neighborhood back what the Pathmark was” in terms of size, about 45,000 square feet.
Board members also discussed the plan to create a left-turn lane on Grove Street, eliminating the on-street parking for residents from Walnut Street to Bloomfield Avenue. That would be “a complete disaster,” Ianuale said. A representative from Bright View Engineering, the redevelopment project’s engineering firm, admitted that on-street parking would be taken away in order to have a left-turn lane. The only other option would be to widen Grove Street, he said.
There’s another option, said board member Carole Willis. “Decrease the bulk of what you’re doing, and that would also decrease the traffic issues.”
One way to reduce parking friction is to “scale down density,” Wynn said to applause from residents. “I also think it’s an element that we don’t want to impact the surrounding neighborhood in a way that’s detrimental to how they live.”
But board member Jacob Nieman said the redevelopment plan will be healthy for Montclair. “There are many benefits to this plan, including the supermarket, dozens of units of affordable housing, and numerous infrastructure improvements,” he said. Montclair Center will “remain a vibrant place that people want to come to and live in.”
Board member Michael Graham, a member of the township’s Historic Preservation Committee, was disappointed that the group was not afforded the opportunity to weigh in on the future of the historic waiting room and how it was to be incorporated into the new design.
Setbacks for the adjacent building will be incorporated into the design so that the waiting room’s north side would face a public passageway, Talley told the board. “We spent a lot of time on how to maintain the integrity of the historic waiting room,” she said.
The board reviewed the subcommittee’s draft correspondence to the Council in detail and said they would continue to discuss it even as Loughman is finalizing the text. The Planning Board has until September 29 to send their recommendations to the Township Council.
I will support the majority in whatever they decide. But, the Planning Board is going in circles…and worse, they 1.) can’t read their own Land Use & Circulation Element (LUCE) of our Master Plan and 2.) the LUCE did not make a zone recommendation, beyond the map on pg 75, covering this site. They are free to say what they think should go in there, but they can’t make stuff up as to what the LUCE says.
The map on pg 75 of the LUCE clearly shows an underlying Montclair Center Village (C4) zone overlayed with Redevelopment Area designation. You can say it is a C2 all you want, but it wouldn’t be correct. And I don’t care if it is a mistake. Not the Council’s problem.
C’mon, ‘fess up people!
It appears to me the PB’s intent in writing this section was to accept the reality the Council would create the appropriate zoning and they either got sloppy with the C4 markings or there was a discussion to make this extremely low density. Either way, the PB screwed themselves. And I’m being nice by not going into the retail aspects of the discussion. That was too painful to enjoy.
We are all so engaged in development within our own communities that we forget to look over our shoulders at what’s happening accumulatively in our territory. The overwhelming destructive effects of overdevelopment are not being summed up.
None of municipalities are conferring on the collective impact on the roads and infrastructures between towns. A woman wrote this in social media – “West Essex and the entire area has been/is being destroyed. In about a 5-mile radius there are 14 – 15 major housing developments. The traffic in our area is hideous and is going to get far worse. When I think of the enormous amount of money, I’ve paid in property taxes over the last three decades it sickens me.”
While working on a design proposal for Caldwell on Bloomfield Avenue, I am realizing that there are no traffic studies that reflect the eventual impact of the 14 -15 massive housing projects going up in our 5-mile radius that includes Montclair and especially Bloomfield Avenue. It would be irresponsible to ignore the impact on traffic that overdevelopment has on our communities in our territory and on the quality of life in Montclair.
Overly developed site proposals can no longer be taken into consideration anywhere in our area. We’ve already maxed out the roads and storm drains.
frankgg,
You suggestion is certainly valid, but I don’t see this ever happening.
Our Planning Board asked for 60 days to review the first release of the LPRP after they already had a preview for 45 days. Fine. And their February report sliced & diced the LPRP, forcing a revised LPRP. Also fine. Then the PB moved the goal posts. Almost too slick for words.
They rewrote the Master Plan the following month! The March 2023 Master Plan that had the mistake I pointed out above. Betcha people didn’t know this.
(FYI, there are quite a few more to the point you shouldn’t trust the accuracy of the maps.).
Anyway, they inserted a new, altered Proposed Zoning map that contradicts the Proposed Zoning maps they left in the report.
I would be a lot less critical if they note/announce all this strange sh*t on their agenda’s, during their meetings, in their minutes and, of course, their report to the Council.
Could this redevelopment project get any more screwed up? Probably!
pg 114 of the Land Use & Circulation Element of the Master Plan
Lackawanna Plaza District
Create a new Lackawanna Plaza redevelopment plan to support the revitalization efforts for the Lackawanna Plaza area:
A to of blah, blah about current conditions, etc. etc. Revised the section to revise the ‘key to the plan” sentence…
Key to the plan is balancing preservation of the historic Lackawanna train station with providing a new state-of-the-art supermarket.
Gee, I could have sworn by feedback from the other 40,000 residents the whole issue boiled down to how big a “state-of-the-art” supermarket we could get without suffering from excess massing, heights & traffic. What is so hard about balancing historic preservation with a “state-of-the-art” supermarket when you have 8.25 acres to play with? It seems our Planning Board is penning some revisionist history for reasons I can only speculate on.
Yes, Frank R. The Planning Board at the time reluctantly accepted the reality that the Council was going to over-ride the PB’s vote on lowering heights to 4 stories throughout the C1 business district — as it impacted the Lackawanna site. So did not force the issue there. That’s because the Board actually hoped the Council would follow its Master Plan designation for those lower heights and change the overall c1 zoning. I know this for a fact because I participated in that debate and discussion vote.
And lowering the downtown heights to preserve what is the feel that remains is what hundreds of residents expressed they wanted at the time during the last master plan hearings. And which the resident planning surveys received specifically for the Lackawanna project then — also said people wanted as their biggest concern. Yet ignored today.
The feeling all around from that time was to legislatively maintain our smaller scale, historic district downtown — which is ONE of the major economic selling points why people do want to come here to visit and spend their money as a destination stop. And why many want to set up businesses and move here. Because of that feeling and architectual charm. So when you start to kill this, and instead ‘Stamfordize’ our downtown, aka Valley and Bloom, you actually begin to detract from one of our core appeals as a regional draw — like Red Bank further south.
It remains the Council’s lack of understanding about this key township selling point — along with our diversity, belief in good schools and lots of cultural activities — that makes us so appealing. And yet, by writing a Redevelopment Plan instead that creates a development on steroids, in contradiction to the maintain neighborhood character goal within the Master Plan — Councilors show no understanding of the above.
The Planning Board — with it’s vote — again tried to set them straight.
Whoa Martin,
I’m just going to fact-check you and say the Planning Board did not vote to make Lackawanna Plaza a C2…OR a C4 zone. If you think I am wrong, but can’t find the supporting documents, let’s go to the Master Plan itself. And let’s ignore what I think was a careless mistake in 2017 on your crew’s part to map it as C4.
The fact remains is that the MP does not speak specifically to the Lackawanna Plaza’s zoning except that it is a Redevelopment Area and a new Redevelopment Plan is forthcoming. It does speak to the surrounding areas. As as long as you are looking at MP’s Montclair Center proposed zoning, look at the other funky stuff. What was the PB’s design inspiration, Gee’s Bend quilts?
I hold you and others to account not because I disagree with you. I say this because you and others are putting words in the Master Plan that are just not there. Interpret all you want. You just can’t say it says something it doesn’t.
Further, I consider the lack of disclosure by the PB on this point alone is legal justification to ignore their position overall and certainly the 2nd report.
They have the option to make the same argument using the underlying C4 zoning, but that would be a fool’s errand. (And read the varying definitions of C4 in the MP.)
Your position’s justification is rightfully based on what a lot of people want, but not using the ambiguity created in the Master Plan.
What I continue to be astounded by is the absolute stupidity of the key feature of the redevelopment plan and its execution. For 6 years I have been detailing the stupidity on the supermarket piece. 6 years.
Everyone is asking for traffic experts, ad nauseam. They are asking for detailed economic impact studies. Has this town hired a retail advisor? No.
Is there ANY retail expertise inn the township’s hierarchy or its bevy of current consultants? Nope.
Hence, I eagerly await our economic impact study (EIS). I’m just going to laugh my way through it. I will laugh how the residents will rationalize the lack of retail expertise & data the we’ll assuredly see in the numbers.
I’m telling you now the EIS release should followed by a keg party.