Welcome to the January 14th meeting of the planning board uh in accordance with the open public meetings act pill 1975, Chapter 231.

Adequate notice of this special meeting of the Planning Board of the Township of Franklin has been provided.

If everyone could please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under the indivisible with liberty and justice for all the okay.

So Councilman Ambarrison, Jennifer Ragnow, Charles Brown all asked to be excused this evening.

Theodore Chase.

Here.

Robert LaCoir.

Mark Dancing here, Robert Thomas.

Chairman Arseni.

Here.

So tonight's meeting is a special meeting to discuss the business and industry zone zoning standards.

So the way this will go, I think, is uh we're gonna hear from Dave Roberts, our consultant.

Uh he's gonna go through what these are.

Uh we can ask him any questions.

Um we'll open to the public for any questions, and then we'll uh we'll vote uh um to send these to council or or yeah or not.

So that's that's the way that'll go.

So um anywho, um without further ado, Mark, I'll turn it over to Dave, Christine, who however you're technologically doing this.

Welcome, Dave.

All right, Dave.

There, I want you to say hi.

Yes, good evening, everyone.

Um again for the record, uh my name is Dave Roberts um with the firm of Brightview Engineering, uh consulting firm that uh worked on both the traffic uh analysis and uh the re-exam report, which is my understanding is the public hearing to this evening for um amending the master plan for adopting the the re-examination report for the business industrial zone.

Um and I guess uh Mark, if you'd like I can just uh go through the uh a kind of a an overview of the of the what led to the production of the the re-exam report and uh kind of brought us uh to the hearing this evening.

Sound good yeah, the floor is yours and uh your uh slide uh shows being is is shown on the screen right now.

Oh very good.

Um first of all, uh I wanted to this the study that uh was undertaken by Brightview is really a two-prong study.

It started with uh a traffic analysis of given of 14 intersections that were identified by the township as being uh critical for analysis for uh for purposes of circulation within the business industrial zone and the business industrial zone being really in two primary areas of the township, uh the northern uh section of the township uh along 287, and then a smaller, a much smaller section of a business industrial zone uh adjacent through 27.

Um and it be as the study started in 2023, uh we were provided the opportunity.

The township assembled a an ad hoc steering committee, and you can see their names uh represented on the on the initial slide on the screen.

Um and uh we want to especially on behalf of Brightview, want to again um thank them for their the time that they um invested uh on behalf of the township as as volunteers uh to give uh valuable insight uh and guidance to us as we uh went through the process and we we met with them uh periodically during the process.

Um and then basically the um uh the the to kind of give bring us back because it's been some time has gone by um since we last had this on our our um plate um if you will, but uh really these these uh this images of the brilliant aerial photograph of the township uh on the right side shows both areas of the township uh the image on the left in the upper left-hand corner sort of zooms in on the northern section of the township.

But uh to really to just to uh uh re kind of review what we're looking at, um the uh white shaded properties, and these are uh uh G this is from a GIS uh uh uh data layer.

The white properties are uh warehouses that are constructed and operational.

Uh what you see shaded in green uh were at the time under construction.

Um what you saw, what do you see shaded in orange were applications that are pending, and in red, there were there were a couple of sites where apple where applications for warehouse uses were denied.

And that's kind of where we were when we uh we started off uh on this journey in in terms of coming up with this land use recommendation for trying to deal with this issue.

Um and you can see in the lower left uh lower left-hand corner, just the magnitude of uh this kind of explosion of growth, uh really um carrying over uh during COVID and and then just sort of taking off from there ever since uh between 2018 and and 2023 at the time that the we quantified everything, there were 37 applications uh totaling 7, uh 795,641 square feet of warehouse base.

And of that, 34% were 2,770 uh 677,752 had been built and occupied.

So that would represent that would represent the white shaded properties.

Um the most prominent of those, as you can see in the upper left-hand corner would be the Amazon site.

Um really out of this out of the community meetings, there were kind of there was a couple of themes that came from a lot of the comments.

And just uh sort of again to review, um, we had uh input that was provided um at the here at these meetings, um, and we uh summarized those in terms of uh a meeting meeting summaries, and then we had steering committee meetings, uh, ad hoc steering committee meetings in between them.

And uh really the main themes were as you can see, kind of shown um in the middle there.

Uh there are seven several interest several intersections, excuse me, that were references needing to be included.

So there's two that came out of the community meetings that were not among the original 14.

Um so we spent about another month um kind of uh get collecting the data for those two intersections to add to the traffic study.

Um and then another theme that came out of the public comments was it is not so much just the impact of uh of truck traffic uh and vehicular traffic being added to the roadways and to the road network of the township, but also the impact of air on air quality and noise pollution that were that was occurring that was uh being felt by the residential neighborhoods that were the closest to where this development was taking place.

And really the last uh kind of main theme was that warehouse uses uh if they're to be if they were to be permitted should be steered away from residential areas.

That's kind of a kind of a uh kind of obvious, but uh easier said than done.

The portion of the business industrial zone between Davidson Avenue and Hum Drive was mentioned um as being an area where warehouses could be accommodated without impacting uh adversely residential areas, and then another uh theme came out was the that that that the regulations that came out of this effort uh would need to be enforceable.

So they would need to be measurable and they would need to be enforceable so that township officials and uh and so on could um use them to be able to um direct the development as to where it was more appropriate and away from areas where it was uh less appropriate.

Um then we as far as the final traffic study report, as I mentioned before, there was a total of 16 intersections that were included in the study.

Um the we we did adjust for the two additional intersections because those counts were done um over the summer, but we had a factor that were added in to account for additional school-related trips that take place during the school year.

Um the the report applied level of service projections to all 16 intersections, and we did it in in um in two different uh uh ways.

One is we took the uh the traffic generated from all uh from all approved and uh under construction um the we already knew the trip the trips that were on the roads from the the uses that were operational, but we added in the additional trips from based on projections from those applications that were approved and those applications that were under construction uh were sites that were in construction but not yet generating traffic on the road.

uh the traffic generated from um all uh from all approved and uh under construction um the we already knew the trip the trips that were on the roads from the the the the uses that were operational but we added in the additional trips from based on projections from those applications that were approved and those applications that were under construction uh were sites that were in construction but not yet generating traffic on the road so we we factored them in it calculated the level of service change then we did a uh another run with based on all pending applications whether uh without any without regards to whether they were approved or denied but assuming that it was a an accountability for future growth um so it was kind of the worst worst case scenario and that's what a lot of that's what those level of service uh projections uh were based on um for a couple of different scenarios and we that those counts are all in the traffic study which is at an appendix to the um the re-exam report um uh the uh appendices were provided for existing which would be which include those are that are operational the uh scenario one which was approved and can uh under construction and scenario two which was everything that was in the pipeline for for all intents and purposes uh projecting those roads on the those trips on the roadways um we had the evaluation in terms of potential zoning strategies uh what we came up uh what came out of the process was that there are uh traditional storage warehouses uh which are have minimum minimum of minimal traffic import uh packs those are the the trip the types of warehouses where storage takes place for long periods of time uh there's there's not a lot of uh of deliveries and uh uh and and pickups of loads the it's a storage warehouse so those those types of warehouses have uh relatively minimal impacts compared to other uses and there are an another a number of them already built in franklin um so we have actual experience with them but then there are the distribution warehouse types uh the most um impactful of which would be the fulfillment centers and the parcel hubs uh which to this at this point at this point in the study there were none in franklin at you at that time but the the there was a you know there's there was a danger that they could come in so we wanted to try to take that those uses off the table and then deal with the ones in between um there because there's a there are the their warehouses have a range of distribute distribution types and a range of of impacts um the what we tried to do then is um the the lower impact distribution warehouses um really all of the distribution warehouses should be where where we needed to direct them away from the residential areas and we the best way to do that was to separately uh define them and and measure them in terms of their impacts um the way we tried to do that was by uh which was uh somewhat in my experience um somewhat um creative and a little unique is by it's the leak the use intensity so and we the we backed into the sizes of the warehouses based on uh trip generation numbers which are based on the square footage uh gross square footage of of the buildings and also um the number of loading docks uh the density of loading docks the number of loading docks per thousand square feet and we came up with three different categories low intensity medium intensity and high intensity uh the high intensity warehouse uh as you can see on on the bottom would be prohibited so the current ban on warehouses would remain in effect for those high impact high intensity um types of warehouses and those would be any warehouse over 400,000 square feet or where the loading dock the ratio of of uh would be higher or above one uh loading dock per 5,000 square feet so the in other words the the one loading dock per through 2,000 square feet or one loading dock per thousand square feet that kind of level of loading dock density um so we have we're left with medium and low um and the with backing up to low anything up to 15000 square feet um would be considered uh low intensity in order of magnitude in terms of the way warehouses go those were those the smaller warehouses um and and some of the warehouses are as small as 5000 square feet that we we have in town so those would be low as long as their loading dock ratio was uh was at one or fewer per 10,000 square feet um and then medium was in between the low and the high um there's a range of between 15000 and 400,000 because if once you once you uh had exceeded 400,000 you'd be in a high density intensity category would not be permitted anywhere in a township um and then the loading uh that the ratio of loading docks is below one loading dock per one or five thousand square feet so between five thousand and ten thousand um so those were the three categories and we would what was uh with the next step was um to

And then the loading uh that the ratio of loading docks is below one loading dock per one or five thousand square feet.

So between 5,000 and 10,000.

So those were the three categories and we would what was uh with the next step was to steer the medium intensity uh types away from the residential area and residential areas and closer to the two interchanges one at Eastern Avenue one at Western Canal Road in that that 280 along the 287 quarter.