A Marmora approval is asked to drop
two affordable units.

The Upper Township Planning Board meets on September 3 with an application on it that asks to change something a previous board already settled. Foglio Family, LLC is seeking amended preliminary and final major site plan approval and D(2) use variance relief on Block 600 Lot 40, at 342 US Route 9 South in Marmora. The purpose named on the agenda is to modify Resolution BA 13-2022 by removing the condition that required two on-site affordable housing units.

That is worth reading carefully, because it is a small number attached to a larger idea. When a board grants relief it can attach conditions, and those conditions become part of the approval rather than a promise made alongside it. An owner who wants one lifted has to come back and ask, on the record, at a public meeting. That is what is happening here. The agenda does not say what is built or planned at the site, how many units the approval covers in total, or why the change is being sought, and none of that is guessed at here.

The same agenda carries two other items South Jersey readers will notice. The board is doing a consistency review of Ordinance No. 015-2026, which the agenda describes as amending the township's zoning chapter to prohibit data centers in all zoning districts, define data centers and accessory server rooms, and permit accessory server rooms in non-residential districts. The ordinance text is not posted yet, so that one sentence is all there is to report. The Tuckahoe Volunteer Fire Company is also seeking a certificate of appropriateness to demolish the former Daughters of America building on Route 50, a historic resource listed on the New Jersey Register of Historic Places.

For anyone following what gets built in Cape May County, the practical point is the shape rather than the size. Two units is a small number. The mechanism behind it is not: conditions on an approval outlive the approval meeting, they run with the land rather than with whoever owned it at the time, and changing one is a public hearing that anybody can attend. Upper Township covers a good deal of ground between the Parkway and the bay, and Marmora sits on the Route 9 corridor the township has spent years planning around.

The meeting starts at 6:00 p.m. at Township Hall, 2100 Tuckahoe Road in Petersburg. Nothing on this list has been decided, and an item on an agenda can be carried, withdrawn or heard and denied.

This is an application on a meeting agenda, not a decision. The board had not heard it when this was written, and an agenda item can be carried, withdrawn, or heard and denied. Written by Justin Kelly, NJ Real Estate Broker-Salesperson, from the Upper Township Planning Board agenda.