Denied six-lot subdivision reconsidered and approved New estates will go up in Rural Preservation zone BY JANE MEGGITT Staff Writer MILLSTONE - Final approval has been granted to a six-lot subdivision at the corner of Old Noah Hunt Road and County Route 526. The Planning Board voted unanimously to approve the application for Country Road Estates at its Feb. 13 meeting. Kenneth Pape, attorney for the applicant, DENJ, said the six lots in the Rural Preservation (RUP) zone average just under 10 acres each and measure a total of 58.4 acres. RUP zoning requires 10-acre lots. With regard to each lot having to measure 10 acres in the RUP zone, Vice Chairman Christopher Pepe, who ran the meeting due to Chairman Mitchell Newman's potential conflict of interest, noted that the property owner to the right of the tract has unusable land. Pape said the neighbor was contacted and refused all offers to buy or sell his land. "That's odd," Pepe said. Mayor Nancy Grbelja said some people in the community have beenmisled into believing that the Planning Board has approved undersized lotswith this application. She said the property originally measured 60 acres, but roadway dedications made over the years have resulted in lots that now measure slightly under 10 acres each. When the application originally came before the board in December 2006, the board turned it down in a 3-2 vote.At a January 2007meeting, Pape asked the board to reconsider the application, citing how late the original hearing commenced and how only five board members had been eligible to vote on it at that time. He also told the board that several large informational exhibits had been prepared that he did not have time to show and that the applicant's engineer, Julia Algeo, did not have an opportunity to speak to the board during the initial hearing. The board heard the application again at its February 2007meeting.At thatmeeting, Algeo showed the board a map of surrounding lots,most ofwhichwere developed when the township had 3-acre zoning. She said that permitted lot averaging would result in six lots that measure 9.9 acres each before land for a county andmunicipal right of way is extracted from the measurement. Without the right-of-way dedication, lot averaging would result in six lots that measure 9.7 acres each, she said. At that meeting, Township Planner Richard Coppola cited aKaufman v.Warren Township court case, in which he had represented Kaufman. Coppola said that Warren Township denied the application, which the appellate court later reversed because the character of the area in question had evidence of undersized lots. The board unanimously granted preliminary approval to DENJ's application last February. Grbelja said that the board cannot penalize the applicant for roadway dedications the township, county and state have done. Pepe told the board thatwhen it reviews the township's master plan later this year, he would like to address the issue of "bowling alley lots," such as those in the application. "We don't want to see something along the road that doesn't reflect 10-acre zoning," Pepe said. Pape said that his client would place a substantial amount of landscaping along the road because Route 526 is part of the county's scenic corridor. He said his client would also place shade trees 25 feet off the road to preserve the berming required by the township. The board had requested recreational use of a pond on the tract, and Pape said his clientwould place the healthy pond in a conservation easement. The easement goes around the pond and can be crossed for access purposes, he said. Restrictive covenants placed on the lots will not allowfor further development of the property, he said. To minimize curb cuts for driveways along Route 526, the site will have the appearance of a shared, wishbone driveway, but will actually have two individual driveways, according to Pape. Algeo said each driveway would measure 10 feet wide with a 4-foot strip between. The continuous apron along both driveways would run into Route 526.