How long a town board has
to decide on a plan
By Justin Kelly
NJ Real Estate Broker-Salesperson
New Jersey's Municipal Land Use Law sets the most time a town board can take before it answers. There are two deadlines: one to call the application complete, one to decide.
At a glance
- A town board has 45 days to tell the applicant whether the application is complete, meaning the town has everything on its own checklist. If the board does not answer, the law can treat it as complete anyway, and the deadline to decide starts there
- From that day, the board has 95 days on the bigger projects, more than 10 acres, more than 10 homes or more than 10 lots. Smaller than that and it is 45 days
- The board gets more time only when the applicant agrees to give it. A deadline that passes with no answer can count as an approval, and claiming that takes a newspaper notice and a sworn statement
Guide
New Jersey's Municipal Land Use Law puts a limit on how long a town board can hold an application before it says yes or no. What the law does not do is set a pace inside the limit, and that is why two towns can take very different amounts of time on the same kind of project.
The first deadline is about paperwork, not the project. When an application comes in, the board has 45 days to tell the applicant whether it is complete. Complete does not mean good. It means the town has everything on its own checklist. If the board does not answer inside those 45 days, and it has not sent written notice of what is missing, the law treats the application as complete anyway.
The second deadline is the decision, and it starts from that complete application, not from the day the plans were dropped off. This deadline covers two kinds of application. A site plan is how a project would sit on the land. A subdivision is splitting land into lots. More than 10 acres or more than 10 homes on a site plan, or more than 10 lots on a subdivision, and the board has 95 days. At or under those sizes, 45 days.
The law lets the deadline run longer when the applicant agrees, and applicants often do. If the board lets the deadline pass with no answer, the law can treat the application as approved. That does not happen on its own. The applicant tells the town and everyone who had to be told about the hearing, publishes the approval in the newspaper, and files a sworn statement that both were done.
For an owner or a buyer watching from outside, the useful part is the starting date. A project that looks stalled in month four may have only just been called complete. Ask what day the board called the application complete, which board is hearing it, and whether the applicant has agreed to give the board more time. The board secretary keeps that record and the meeting calendar is public. What any of it means for an application you are part of is a question for your own attorney.
This is the outside limit the state law sets. Towns still run on their own meeting calendars, and what happens on a particular application is a question for the board hearing it. Written by Justin Kelly, NJ Real Estate Broker-Salesperson. More at South Jersey New Construction.
Our take
The board's deadline to decide starts when it calls the application complete, not when the builder files it. If a builder is talking to you about your land, we can help you follow where its application stands.
