We only want to limit your density

After arguing for months about the concern of density on the property at Monmouth St, West St, and Oakland St the town decided to increase the allowed density around the train station to create a transit village. I sought a density of 16 units per acre by doing exactly what was permitted which was to build 4 units above retail space at a time 14 units per acre were allowed. This seemed to upset Rich Kosenski of T & M Engineering and was the basis for his denial of constructing buildings 1 inch a apart. Once the town found out that I was losing the property to Amboy Bank, they began to rezone my property based on those parcels identified in MLS tax records as being in pre-foreclosure. rb zoning changes As you can see the original map only covers the 3 lots in pre-foreclosure (2 tax records 3 lots), then a few months later they decided to re-zone my entire property which covered 8 parcels of land. I gave the property back to Amboy Bank in February or March of 2009 at around the same time that the town started working on the zoning change. You can even see how the map lines were an after thought You also notice that the original natural boundry would have been west of West Street and this group of properties are the only ones on the east side of West Street. The new transit village zone raised the allowed density to 35 units per acre. There were several people involved with the town that had access to the tax records in mls and it is probably not a coincidence that the rezoning of the property was done in 2 stages and then ultimately approved for 57 units by Amboy Bank a year later.

Appealing the Zoning Decision

After failing to change the Red Bank Zoning Officials minds about having 5 separate buildings that had a 1 inch separation between them and had all of the permitted uses in the zone, I was forced to go before the Zoning Board of Red Bank to overturn the decision. rb zoning board decision july 2007 Just so everyone is clear, the variance I was seeking, and the one that the town disagreed on, was that you are required to provide a distance between buildings of 15 feet. This parcel is one of the largest in downtown Red Bank and had about 250 linear feet on Monmouth Street and approximately 200 feet on West Street as well as 100 feet on Oakland Street. The only thing that the distance between buildings could change is the width of the units whereby I had to shrink each unit by approximately 4 feet (15 feet distance shared by each building 7.5 feet per building shared by 2 units per floor for a little less than 4 feet per unit). The units could still remain basically the same size (roughly 200sqft smaller) with same bedroom counts. The density also remained the exact same with a loss of approximately 2,000 sqft of retail space. As you can see by reading the transcripts during the hearing, the board members identified that they were looking at 5 boxes and if each box represented a building they were looking at 5 buildings. Even Rich Kosenski of T & M Engineering stated that a person could look at my application and say that it is correct to assume that there are 5 buildings but that he did not like the idea of the buildings being so close to one another. Rich Kosenski also serves on the planning board so if he did not like the distance between the buildings, they were under no obligation to grant the variance. As stated previously, by keeping me in front of the zoning board would delay the approval process whereas the planning board did not have  much in front of it and sometimes would not meet at all due to a lack of approval applications. We never stated that Red Bank had to grant this variance and as we later find out the variance is eliminated all together to allow the application proceed to the planning board. The voting took place and all of the zoning board members decided to support the Director of Zoning and Planning’s  decision but did not give a real reason as to why the town was correct and my experts were wrong.