Adler has already started tearing down an existing industrial building on the site, located at the intersection of Homestead Avenue and Blair Road here. The previous owner, Ecolab, vacated the 235,000-sf building in mid-2002 and sold it to Adler this past summer for an undisclosed price. No price tag has been released for the new facility.

In the application submitted to the planning board, the new facility would have a total of 60 truck-loading bays and 16 trailer-parking spaces. The site would also have almost 180 parking spaces for employees, according to the firm's Joshua Adler.

The site has also had some contamination problems. Ecolab, a St. Paul-based company, is a maker of commercial cleaning and sanitizing products, and had used the site for a variety of uses for a number of years. Adler officials say they have been working with Ecolab on an effort to remediate the site before the start of construction of the new facility.

Adler also says his company is in the process of finding a tenant for the building, although no announcement of a possible occupant has been made yet. He has indicated that there will be no manufacturing operations in the new building.

In response to questions about traffic generated by the finished building, the warehouse will operate on a 24-hour schedule, according to Adler, and isn't expected to generate any more volume than did the Ecolab building when it was at full capacity. The site itself is close to the New Jersey Turnpike and is accessible to the ports of Newark and Elizabeth.

The 44-year-old Adler Development Co. currently has a portfolio of more than one million sf of office and warehouse properties, as well as 800 apartment units. Besides the local project, it has about 600,000 sf worth of properties either recently completed or in the proposal stages.