NJ Court Tosses Board’s Veto of 2.1M SF Warehouse Project

A Superior Court Judge in Gloucester County, NJ has reversed Harrison Township’s decision denying approval to a 2.1M industrial campus in a rural part of the township, which is near Philadelphia.

Judge Benjamin Telsey found that Harrison Township’s Joint Land Use Board had acted in an “arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable” manner in December, when it rejected a proposal from Russo Development to build four warehouses on a 160-acre rural site, CoStar reported.

In his ruling, the judge said that the Dec. 15 board hearing, attended by 300 people as well as local television news crews, “quickly got out of control.” The judge suggested that “outrage of the crowd” influenced the board to “find a reason to deny the application,” the report said.

The Joint Land Use Board cited inadequate ingress and egress in the developers plans, a finding that Telsey ruled was “not supported by any evidence.”

Last month, Telsey dismissed another lawsuit that aimed to stop the industrial project by nullifying the township’s redevelopment plan, which allows the construction of warehouses.

The Casella Farms Homeowners Association and Holding Hands Daycare filed the lawsuit, which claimed the King’s Landing Redevelopment Plan unlawfully violated the township’s master plan.

Harrison Township’s designation last year of a redevelopment area that includes the Mullica Hill section of the township enabled Carlstadt, NJ-based Russo Development to submit its plan for the industrial complex.

The industrial vacancy rate in Southern New Jersey increased by 330 bps, in a year-over-year comparison, to 7.4% in the second quarter, according to a market report from Savills.

The top three industrial leases in Southern New Jersey in the second quarter included a 252K SF lease inked by YesWay Logistics at the Tac-Pal Logistics Center on Route 73; a 213K SF renewal by Owens & Minor at a facility at 301 Bordentown-Hedding Road; and a 97.5K SF renewal by ALPI USA at a warehouse at 499 Commerce Drive.

Last year, New Jersey’s State Planning Commission (SPC) issued new warehouse siting guidelines that urge municipalities to update their master plans as well as local land-use and zoning ordinances to reduce their vulnerability to “poorly sited and scaled” warehouse projects.

“Many towns in New Jersey are finding that their communities are particularly vulnerable to poorly sited and scaled warehousing projects because they zoned large areas of their community, particularly farmland in rural areas, for broadly applied ‘light industrial’ use,” the Planning Commission said in the introduction to the guidelines.

“As a result, many land-use plans and zoning ordinances may be inadequate in their present form to address the pace and scale of new warehousing proposals,” SPC said.

The agency noted that municipal officials in South Jersey have been shocked to learn that projects aiming to build mega-warehouses on acres of rural land largely conform to existing zoning standards.

“Given the scale and intensity of new and emerging warehousing trends and building types, zoning that simply permits generic warehousing may not be sufficient to address the different types of warehousing uses, nor to give a municipality the performance standards it needs to adequately review an application or require developers to properly minimize and mitigate impacts,” the state agency said.