Navesink Riverside Residences and Marina (formerly Riverview Towers), center, and the Atrium at Navesink Harbor, to its right, are in the waterfront zone. (Photo by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge.)
By JOHN T. WARD
Red Bank’s planning board made quick work of approving two pending ordinances Monday night.
At a meeting that lasted just 13 minutes, the board found proposed changes to maximum building heights, and fees paid by developers in lieu of planting trees, did not conflict with the borough’s Master Plan.
Both amendments had been forwarded by the council for review because of their impacts on the borough’s land use law.
One, NP2023-11, would set a new building height limit of “50 feet, or five stories, as measured from the average grade” in the Waterfront Development Zone, which allows for the tallest structures permitted in town.
The change was needed, planning Director Shawna Ebanks told the board, because the existing language is “confusing” and based on an “outdated’ metric.
The current height limit in the zone is 75 feet, as measured from mean sea level on the Navesink River. Adjoining zones cap building heights at 40 feet.
The issue of how to measure height has been a point of friction in the past, as when a developer proposed a six-story Hampton Inn hotel on the former site of an Exxon station on Route 35 at Rector Place. The plan was approved in 2017, but the hotel never got built, and the site up for approval as a home to a cannabis shop.
The ordinance change “should have been done a long time ago,” Ebanks told the board, with just two residents and a reporter in the live audience.
The board also approved a recommendation (NP2023-12) from the Shade Tree Committee that developers be charged $1,000 for every tree they don’t plant as required, depending on lot width, in a public right-of-way.
The current fee is $500 per tree. The aim of the increase is to influence builders to plant trees themselves, rather than pay into the borough’s Shade Tree Trust Fund, Ebanks said.
The council is expected to hold adoption votes on both amendments at its next meeting, scheduled for October 12.
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