ROXBURY, NJ – Tractor-trailers coming and going from a massive warehouse project being proposed for the former Hercules site in Kenvil will need fuel.
Roxbury Planning Board Chairman Charles Bautz fears that fact.
His concern, one of several expressed by Bautz and other board members during a recent meeting, is that truckers will not simply come and go from Route 80, as the project’s developers contend. When their rigs need diesel fuel, those drivers will likely venture onto local roads, Bautz said.
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“I feel we’re making a lot of assumptions,” he told representatives of Hartz Mountain Industries, the developer proposing the 2.5-million-square-foot warehouse project on Howard Boulevard.
The developers predict most trucks headed to the site will come from the east on Route 80 westbound. Hartz Mountain believes the drivers will get off at the Howard Boulevard exit, make their deliveries to the warehouses and head right back onto the interstate.
As a means of preventing big trucks from doing otherwise, Hartz Mountain proposes signs barring truckers leaving the site from turning left on Howard Boulevard (to head southbound toward Route 46). But Bautz suggested the real problem will not be when the trucks depart. It will be when they arrive.
“Most truckers are going to need fuel,” he said at the Sept. 6 board meeting. He said drivers will want to top-off their tanks before making their deliveries, possibly at the Kingtown Truck Stop on Route 46 in Ledgewood.
Roxbury Mayor Jim Rilee, who also sits on the planning board, agreed. “They’ll come off (Route 80) at the Netcong exit,” get fuel at Kingtown and take Route 46 through Ledgewood to Howard Boulevard, he said.
Hartz Mountain’s traffic engineer, Daniel Disario, conceded he did not try to predict truck fueling scenarios when writing his traffic study. The accuracy of that study was something else the planning board questioned at the meeting, contending traffic counts used by Disario were outdated.
“We’re wasting time on 5-year-old numbers,” Bautz said, questioning Disario’s reliance on counts taken years ago by county and state agencies. He said Hartz Mountain should have conducted new tallies before filing its application.
“You knew what you were coming in for,” he said. “You could have said, ‘Screw the state. Screw the county' ... You’re coming in with a humongous application with counts of 4,306 trips per day just into your site. Why wouldn’t you take the approach to do something last September before we started? Why weren’t (you) proactive. Every board member’s saying it. It just seems silly to me.”
Disario disagreed. “I take issue with your characterization of all the work we put into this,” he retorted. “In what I’ve submitted to you, we identified what we think is the traffic this project is going to generate. The fact is, the amount of traffic this development is going to generate as a warehouse development is not significant.”
Hartz Mountain needs a zoning variance to build the so-called "Roxbury Commerce Center" on about 200 acres of the 1,000-acre site. It contends the warehouses will bring fewer vehicles to Roxbury than would an office park that would not need such a variance.
What About Mt. Arlington?
A fear that truck traffic will not simply go between the site and Route 80 was also expressed at the meeting by residents of adjacent Mount Arlington. Among those expressing that concern was Mount Arlington Mayor Mike Stanzilis.
“I completely agree with you wanting to prohibit the left-hand turn to go into Roxbury,” he said. “I don’t want them to go into Mount Arlington.”
Bautz agreed about the potential impact on Mount Arlington from truckers that need local services.
“We are trying, best we can, to get them back onto Route 80 eastbound with the least amount of impact,” he said. “I have concern about items they may need to get back on the road. Obviously, do we want them going into Mt. Arlington? No. We want them to go onto Route 80.”
The board will continue to review the proposal at its Oct. 4 meeting.
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