BERKELEY – A hearing before the town’s land use board was postponed while the developer produced a traffic study, and traffic is the main thing neighbors are worried about.
Victorian Pines will be a new neighborhood of homes in a small area near the trestle. Thirty-five new houses would be built on several new streets.
There’s a road that has several different names as it winds through the woods. Princeton Avenue and Noble Avenue are two of them. After it becomes Berkeley Avenue it would lead to the planned development.
Neighbors said the road can’t handle the additional homes. The roads there are narrow, and it’s hard to navigate past each other if two cars are coming from opposite directions. Cars parked on the side of the road make it even more difficult. There’s a sharp S-shaped turn that is of major concern to the residents, as is an area school bus stop.
Township Planner James Oris said that the Planning Board shares residents’ concerns regarding traffic.
The development was to be heard at the July 1 Planning Board meeting but that hearing was adjourned. The developer said a traffic engineer was hired to perform the study, but more time was required to complete it. The hearing was rescheduled to the Board’s August 5 meeting.
During the May 6 meeting, which was the last one that was held on the issue, the developer’s attorney, Paul Werther, said that the plan is a renewal of one that was approved in 2014. However, there was a delay with the State Department of Environmental Protection which meant that they had to return.
The developer’s engineer, Jeffrey Carr, said that DEP rules are more stringent now, so this plan is better for the environment. For example, driveways use porous pavers, the roofs collect water and deposit into the ground, and small recharge basins recharge the groundwater.
These basins were an issue for some Planning Board members as there needed to be some guarantee that the residents would maintain them. The township didn’t want that responsibility.
“Is my property going to be flooded because my neighbor didn’t take care of his property?” Planning Board Chairman Nick Mackres asked, putting himself in the place of a resident there.
There was a discussion about forming a homeowners association to take care of that issue.
Township Engineer Ernie Peters said that the average homeowner doesn’t know how to take care of these basins, and it might fall to the township anyway. A homeowners association only has so much power to enforce things. The developer builds a project and walks away, and residents are left to complain to the town about it.
Carr said the basins may never need maintenance and they are becoming more common throughout the state.
The engineers were going to research the best way to handle the drainage issues of the property before coming back before the Planning Board.
The developer has already donated 4.5 acres of the property to the township as a conservation easement, Werther said. This means that the town will keep this as passive open space in exchange for allowing the developer to build on another portion of the property. The developer also gave the town $125,000 in lieu of not building sidewalks.
Planning Board Attorney Gregory McGuckin made it a point that although it was approved in 2014, this is a different Planning Board.
