Guest Column
Mario Giudice
Chairman: Planning Board
has town’s interests at heart

Many newspaper articles, letters to the editor and public regarding the closing of Marlboro Airport, have always used incorrect information.

As chairman of the Marlboro Planning Board, I have decided to use this medium to set the facts straight. Please do not take this as if we the Planning Board are trying to "shove this down your throat" as Township Council President (Paul) Koval-ski has implied.

Our amending the master plan is a duty that the Planning Board is directed to perform as a result of the Land Use Act of 1975. Why Mr. Kovalski is looking to make this a political issue, I truly do not understand. If he and the council are not in favor of our recommendations they can easily vote down the plan. This will save the citizens of Marlboro the extra incurred costs.

The Marlboro Planning Board’s role is quasi-judicial whose purpose is to ensure that applicants who want to develop properties do so within the confines of the zoning laws set up by the council.

The 1997 master plan, never adopted by the council, has caused builders, due to rejections on some of their applications, to sue the Planning Board and the township. The litigations rezoned many of these sites. This had a negative result on the land use element of the master plan.

It no longer matched the land use element of the 1997 master plan. Thus in 2001 the Planning Board decided to amend the land use element to update the master plan to what actually existed as a result of the rezoning done by the litigations, and the opportunity to make some changes that would rectify odd and one-of-a-kind lots that were inappropriately zoned, and leftover lots from rezoning that had occurred. Of interest, in the 1997 master plan, the Planning Board up-zoned a great deal of property along Route 79, Pleasant Valley and Conover roads.

In January 2001, I received a letter from the owners of the airport stating they were planning to close it due to crashes at the airport, concerns about proximity to the Marlboro Early Learning Center and security issues resulting from the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack. The owners recommended developing the 50-plus acre site for senior housing.

We took this request and added it to the other requests we received. We then instructed the (board’s) planner to review all of the requests and return with his recommendations.

Mr. (Stanley) Young, a long-standing and past chairman of the Planning Board, realized that with the removal of the Airport Hazard zone, the 100-plus acres surrounding the airport would become available for development.

The board added these parcels to our recommendations.

Closing the airport opened up 151.07 acres for development. If we had decided to do nothing, the developers would be able to build 65 homes.

This would add 98 children to our schools at a cost of $686,000 (at a conservative $7,000 per child). From the tax revenue from these homes, $479,635 would go to the school district. This leaves a deficit of $206,365 per year. Who will pay for that? You and I would. We just recently had to build a new middle school, at an exorbitant cost. The owners wanted to build 240 age-restricted homes, not the 1,000 that has been claimed in the press. This would generate approximately $2.6 million of positive tax revenue without any corresponding cost to educate more children. This will give the township positive dollars to offset taxes.

Building 65 single-family homes, 50 percent of the wetlands will be infringed upon. Senior housing would only infringe on 15 percent of the wetlands. Also, age-restricted houses would generate fewer trips per day than single-family homes. Most of these trips would be outside of the traffic peak periods, thus reducing the impact on rush hour traffic. The board took all this into consideration. The main issues we had to deal with were all of the available land that could be developed.

In reviewing state recommendations, the board decided to increase the age-restricted housing to be in concert with towns abutting us. Most of the towns around us, and throughout the state, are at a much higher percentage, some over 20 percent. At present, 12 percent of the housing in Marlboro is age-restricted. Thus it was good planning judgment to agree with some of the planner’s recommendations relative to developing some of the land for age-restricted housing.

The last census has shown that the present population is getting older. Parents are opting to stay near their family for many reasons, primarily their grandchildren. We do not have enough age-restricted housing in Marlboro to accommodate this need.

In addition, by stopping the building of single homes and building age-restricted homes, has some of the results of up-zoning, restricting the growth of our school population.

We have all been reading in our local papers the latest issue with COAH (the state Council On Affordable Housing); this, too, was of great interest to the board in our deliberation.

In closing, each of us is entitled to make our own judgment about what is good for our town, but no one is entitled to their own facts. The information I presented clearly demonstrates that the Planning Board recommendations to the land use element of the master plan have Marlboro’s interests at heart. Remember, all of us live in Marlboro.

Mario Giudice of Marlboro is the chairman of the Marlboro Planning Board.