LITTLE SILVER – After two years of planning board meetings, the application for an 11,000-square-foot Brickwall Tavern near the NJ Transit station was withdrawn last month, but the saga continued Monday.
During a meeting of the governing body, the borough council voted 5-0 to issue the municipality’s lone liquor license to BrickWall at Little Silver, LLC, but adopted a special condition as an added layer of control over its future.
According to the resolution the license must be active no later than June 20, 2021.
If 26 months pass and the license is not attached to the address of an identified project site, the borough council, acting as the local issuing authority, will have the power to deny a request for renewal by the applicant and seek its revocation.
“The license has been paid for previously, the money is in escrow. (The applicant) now has the option of selling it, or proposing a new location, or doing something else in the same location,” Little Silver Mayor Robert Neff said. “They’ll have about two years to implement it before we have the option of revoking it.”
The license was attached to a proposed project at 51 Oceanport Ave., a lot owned by Kelly 29, LLC that measures 0.63-acres.
The proposal included a two-story restaurant with two bars on the first floor and a third bar with an outdoor balcony on the second floor. The tavern would have had a maximum capacity of 250 patrons.
The scale of the project and its proximity to nearby residential development drew the ire of residents, including 15 members of the Townhomes at Little Silver, who hired Hazlet-based attorney Jeffrey B. Gale to represent them during the hearings.
The potential for noise pollution from tavern patrons and musicians taking the party to the outdoor balcony was a point of concern, as were the proposed hours of operation. The tavern would be closed to customers at 2 a.m., and the last of the employees would exit the premises by 3 a.m.
The application hinged upon an agreement between Kelly 29, LLC and NJ Transit. By ordinance, the project required 230 parking spaces. The site plan proposed just 36 spaces on location.
At a February hearing the developer’s attorney, Jennifer Krimko of Ansell Grimm & Aaron, P.C. in Ocean, supplied a letter of intent from NJ Transit.
The letter outlined terms that would allow the applicant to direct overflow traffic into the nearby commuter lot for the Little Silver train station.
The lot’s exit point onto Oceanport Avenue was another concern for residents, who worried their quiet neighborhood and quality of life would be compromised by an abundance of through traffic circling back toward Little Silver’s downtown and adjacent municipalities like Red Bank, Fair Haven and Rumson.
“We were never opposed to having something at that site,” opposition group member Tom Kennedy said in a May 6 interview. “But the scale of the project and the hours of operation really didn’t fit with the makeup of the town. I think people were expecting a normal-sized restaurant to go there. But something that huge just didn’t fit in.”
Gale said he believes complications with the agreement between the applicant and NJ Transit led to the unanimous dismissal without prejudice by the planning board.
BrickWall at Little Silver, LLC purchased the liquor license in December 2016, when it submitted the high bid of $350,000.
Following the withdrawal of Kelly 29’s site plan application in early April, BrickWall notified the borough council of its intent to remove the license from the 51 Oceanport Ave. property.
The license was officially issued in “pocket status” – without attachment to a physical borough location – to BrickWall April 16.
