By Sunayana Prabhu
RED BANK – A proposal for the construction of another cannabis retail shop came before the planning board Nov. 6. Pending approval, the applicant, Garden At Red Bank LLC, will be the borough’s fourth cannabis retailer on the West Side of the borough, where three other pot shops have recently been issued licenses.
The new single-story building proposed for Garden At Red Bank will replace the abandoned gas station at 199 Riverside Ave. This corner lot is located at the foot of Coopers Bridge, often called the gateway to Red Bank.
Douglas Berns, the attorney representing the applicant, called the property a “more or less blighted eyesore” and noted there is still an environmental cleanup ongoing from the property’s previous use. Berns said his client is committed to seeing the cleanup through to completion.
Frequent references to a Hampton Inn previously considered for the property were made in multiple testimonies presented at the Monday meeting by the applicant’s professional team, including architect Jessie Moberg, engineer Chris Bednarski, traffic planner Gary Dean and security consultant Mike Allen.
The site falls within the borough’s waterfront development zone along the Navesink River. The proposed cannabis retail shop includes constructing a one-story, 2,542-square-foot building with 31 parking spaces and associated site improvements, including but not limited to utilities, landscaping and lighting. “We plan to construct improvements within the previously disturbed areas and that is going to reduce the amount of impervious surfaces on site and also increase the amount of open space to 66% of the site,” said Bednarski.
Requesting a waiver for parking in the front instead of the rear by the river, Bedrinski said the application is “essentially variance-free.” The applicant, he said, is exempt from stormwater quantity run-off “because we’re directly discharging into the Navesink River which is a tidal water body and we are also exempt from groundwater recharge requirements, because of the previous nature of the site being the gas station.”
“This is an opportunity to really fix that corner,” said Don Mancuso, planning board chairperson. Mancuso called the intersection, which accommodates traffic from Riverside Avenue (Route 35), Bridge Avenue and Rector Place, “one of the worst in town.”
“If you shaved five or six feet off in that corner (of the property), to facilitate a better turning radius, I think that will go a long way” to improving the intersection, Mancuso said.
Fair Haven resident John Overhill, who owns the property next to the proposed cannabis dispensary, requested the applicant plant a row of “16-foot high arborvitae” and a vinyl fence on the property line for safety and privacy.
“We’ll look at it. It’s certainly our intention to improve the site,” Berns said. “We did get recommendations from the environmental commission on exactly what they’d like to see there and we’re going to comply with that.”
The architect Moberg provided an overview of the flow of the building and odor mitigation measures taken through HVAC filtration as part of the overall design, although the business will not be a cannabis cultivating or manufacturing facility. The team has also met with RiverCenter’s visual improvements committee to “tweak the design to better integrate Red Bank downtown and special district to establish aesthetics,” said Moberg. Depending on the final floor plan the building “could fit a total of 34 customers and seven staff members,” he noted.
Traffic engineer Dean, who has previously appeared before the board with the application for a Hampton Inn at the same site, urged its members to consider a dedicated left turn on Route 35 into the site, which currently has three driveways for ingress and egress.
Dean said the gas station would generate about 120 trips per hour; the proposed hotel traffic would have reduced that to around 102. The current application “brings it down to anywhere from a quarter to half of what this site previously did,” Dean said.
Explaining his “rationale” for a dedicated left turn lane to enter the property, Dean said that an undivided road like Route 35 can be designed to make a safe left turn into the property. The alternative for customers driving north is to cross the bridge and travel to the nearest jughandle at Navesink River Road in Middletown, then drive back southbound to the shop. “Do I think people will do it? It’s human nature, probably not,” said Dean.
Dean’s concern is that even without the left turn lane, drivers will attempt to turn left into the property rather than traveling to the jughandle. “I would rather have that controlled in a sanctioned, dedicated left turn lane where it’s safe to do so rather than someone disregarding regulation and prohibition and try(ing) to do it anyway,” he said.
Allen, the applicant’s security consultant and a retired police officer from Rochester, New Hampshire, spoke about implementing a process called Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, a set of design principles and methodologies that are part of security requirements for the site. According to Allen, a system to verify fake IDs will be installed “that not only scans a barcode but also authenticates an ID.” Additionally, the state’s Cannabis Regulatory Commission mandates it have access to video surveillance on the property. “We also go above and beyond that,” Allen said, “and we give that access to the Red Bank Police Department,” what he called an important element of the security plan.
Resident John Talerico asked Allen about the impact of dispensaries on the crime rate in a neighborhood. “We’re going to have possibly three dispensary sites within a block in the neighborhood with young families,” Talerico said. A lot of these facilities are being built in “blighted areas” or on properties that are “just sitting there vacant for a long time,” Allen said, noting that when state-of-the-art camera surveillance, alarm systems and security staff are employed “the actual crime statistics that have been tracked have actually gone down.”
The board carried the application to Dec. 18 to hear additional traffic details.
This article originally appeared in the November 16 – 22, 2023 print edition of The Two River Times.
