UPDATE: This application has been carried to the Planning Board’s Dec. 3rd meeting. This was announced at the board’s September 17 meeting, and there will be no further notice given.
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Update as of Sept. 3, 2009: The board had carried the application to its Sept. 17 meeting, but on Sept. 2 the application’s attorney Thomas Sharlow requested in a letter that the Planning Board wait until at least October to continue discussion.

Discussion on the application for a three story building with 16 rental apartment units and first floor commercial space on the corner of Hillside Avenue and Inn Place will continue at a Sept. 17 Planning Board meeting.

The application proposes 22 parking spaces for the building though Metuchen’s ordinance requires 50 spaces. As a result, they require a waiver from the board to bypass the parking requirement.

However, at its Aug. 20 meeting, the Planning Board cited the need for the applicant to present expert testimony on the parking issue before deciding whether to grant the waiver.

“It seems as though the board is seeking more testimony as justification for granting a waiver for the parking,” Sharlow said at the meeting. “We will come back again with the additional expert testimony to support testimony for the setback and parking. The tenants targeted for this building are commuters and rail-riders, reducing the need for parking for the residential component of the building. We are confident that given the unique project we propose here, the close proximity to the train station, and the past approvals that have been granted to residential development in the downtown area, this application proposes adequate parking.”

The applicant and co-owners of the property are Metuchen Investors LLC and Epic, Inc. According to testimony provided at the meeting, Metuchen Investors LLC is owned by borough attorney David Frizell and his wife. Epic is a family-owned construction firm based in Piscataway, according to its website. One of Epic’s co-owners, Robert Epifano, provided testimony at the meeting.

The building as proposed is a mixed use development consisting of four retail units on the first floor and 16 residential units on the second and third floors above. The residential units would consist of eight one-bedroom and eight two-bedroom units. The building would have a total of 20,713 sq. ft. of space, comprised of approximately 16,059 sq. ft. of residential units and 4,654 sq. ft. of office space.

Twenty-eight spaces are required by the borough’s ordinance for the residential units alone, based on the one and two bedroom distribution of the residential units as they are currently proposed, while 22 spaces are required for the retail use, for a total of 50 required spaces. The applicant requested to provide 22 total parking spaces, with four spaces for the retail use.

The existing site at the corner of Hillside Avenue and Inn Place currently has three two-story residential buildings that front on Hillside Avenue, which would be demolished.

The applicant also requests a variance for a front yard setback on Hillside Avenue. The applicant requests a setback of 3.5 ft., though the ordinance requires a setback of 10 ft.

At the meeting’s start, Epifano provided details about his firm, Epic, Inc.

“We are a commercial and institutional builder and build throughout New Jersey,” Epifano said. “I have been building with Epic for over 20 years, and my brother and I run it today. It was a company my Dad started in 1971. Some of our current projects include a 1,500 space parking garage for Montclair State University and a new 360,000 sq. ft. high school for Union City. We are also the construction manager for the Rutgers football stadium expansion.”

“Epic also represents a number of public sector clients, including the state and a number of counties and boards of education, and we serve private sector clients like J and J, ImClone, and Princeton University,” he said.

Epifano said that the building’s residential units would serve as a “buffer” between the downtown commercial zone that is Main Street and the residential area that is Hillside Avenue.

“I think the residential component is the best use of this location due to the rail and downtown,” Epifano said. “We understand that Metuchen applied for and received a transit village designation, and we are hoping that our project fits within that concept of a transit village. We recognize that the project sits in the B-1 business zone and that commercial units are required by ordinance, but it is Main Street that creates a market for small, high quality residential units.”

The B-1 central business district of Metuchen comprises the downtown Main Street business area. However, apartment units are also allowed as long as they are not located on the ground floor of any building. Offices are also permitted – unless they are on the ground floor of buildings that front Main Street.

The applicant agreed to the stipulation that restaurants would not be part of the development. They also expected many of the first floor stores’ customers to be walk-ins from neighboring stores, after having parked in Metuchen’s downtown area.

Architect for the applicant Robert Adler said that the proposed four retail shops on the ground level would have standard business hours, and that each retail store would be assigned one parking space as they would have one to two employees each.

“There is a potential that they can be combined to be three or two larger units, but we have it laid out right now as four small units,” Adler said. “Given the size of these units, these are the type of units where you would have one employee, or perhaps two. They are just not large enough stores to have more than that. There would be four designated [parking] spaces for the employees of the commercial space, one per shop.”

Adler also said that the building residents would not have direct access to the street below, but instead they would exit down into a courtyard in the “back section” of the property.

“Within that courtyard, at the recommendation of the Technical Review Committee, (TRC), we have added a stairway that goes from the back courtyard out onto Hillside,” Adler said. “The concern was that you would get trapped in that courtyard if you went in through the driveway, and a pedestrian would not be able to get out otherwise.”

“The TRC also recommended that on the Inn Place side, we have no access or any windows into the commercial spaces, so they just present themselves to Hillside,” he said. “This makes sense because Hillside in that general area is very commercial in aspect, but as soon as you pass Inn Place it becomes more residential. We also put a couple of Juliet balconies on Hillside to give it a little more of a third dimension and nicer character… so the residential units can interact with the streetscape.”

In lieu of a sidewalk, the TRC also recommended substantial landscaping, or foundation planting, on the Inn Place side of the building, given the street’s narrowness.

Engineer for the applicant Jeffrey Szabo broke down how the application’s proposed 22 parking spaces would be used by the building’s tenants.

“Each [residential unit] tenant will have an assigned parking space, which would come to 16 spaces,” Szabo said. “Four spaces will also be assigned to the tenants of the retail spaces, so that comes to 20 spaces. With the additional two spaces on-site available for use by residential tenants or retail tenants, that is 22 spaces on-site.”

Szabo also confirmed that Inn Place would be repaved by the applicant. Though his firm did not do a traffic study to justify why the applicant should receive a waiver to bypass the parking requirement of 50 spaces, Szabo provided as evidence the example of a similar application that was recently approved by the city of Rahway.

“I have some prior experience working on a similar project up the road in Rahway,” Szabo said. “It is a very similar layout with a ground floor for commercial use, and above that were three stories, 12 units per story, for 36 units above. They agreed that one [space] per unit was appropriate based on its close proximity to downtown services and commuter rail line. As a result, this application before you tonight is justified due to the size of the units and very close proximity to the mass transit and downtown area. Simply speaking, people living here would not have two or three cars that someone living further out in the suburbs would have.”

“Our office has a lot of studies in parking in transit areas especially,” Szabo said. “NJ Transit has a design manual it uses for planning such areas. This area is known as a transit village because it is closer than one quarter mile from the train station. They have recommendations for residential reductions in parking numbers from typical [Residential Site Improvement Standards] numbers, and they recommend a reduction of 25 to 30 percent in the parking requirements.”

Borough Planner Jim Constantine reminded the Planning Board that it has the ability to conduct its own traffic study as well.

“There is one other option the board has as well,” Constantine said. “As we did with the [District at Metuchen] application for Renaissance Properties, the borough does have a parking expert that has been engaged for studies… if the borough wants a third party opinion.”

“I think that is an excellent idea,” replied Planning Board Chair Eric Erickson. “I would very much like to have a parking expert on our behalf as well so that there is some intelligent discourse on this issue. I would recommend we procure that expert.”