Following a very contentious, nearly 3-hour public hearing on Tuesday night before the Lakewood Township Planning Board, the developers of Bnos Yaakov agreed to withdraw their application to legalize their banquet hall.
The Board did approve the expansion of their parking lot and a child care facility.
The existing school has sixty-two off-street parking spaces, accessible only from Kent Road.
On June 4, 2021, the school purchased the adjoining lot at 18 Cathedral Drive for $300,000. The seller was Ari Goldner. Since that time the school demolished the existing home and turned it into a gravel parking lot.
The neighbors who were upset that a parking lot got plopped down along their long and narrow residential cul-de-sac reported the illegal parking lot to the Township, who in turn ordered the school to submit an application for a Site Plan review for a paved parking lot.
In May 2022, the school did present a Site Plan application to the Planning Board, despite, as illustrated more fully here on FAA News, only the Zoning Board has jurisdiction to approve a parking lot as the principal use of the lot in a residential zoning district. Numerous neighbors opposed the application.
Neighbors also presented the school's fundraising brochure which indicated they were building a banquet hall for outside rentals. As previously reported here on FAA News, Attorney Adam Pfeffer baldly denied existence of any banquet hall.
Since that time, the banquet hall was constructed, whereas the 31 spaces paving work was never completed and the gravel area remains.
As previously reported here on FAA News, in May 2023, the school closed on the $650,000 purchase of 20 Cathedral Drive.
On Tuesday night the Planning Board approved Application SP-2546 for a parking lot expansion of fifty-three spaces. The new total number of off-street parking spaces would be one hundred fifteen.
All ingress and egress will only be through Kent Road and County Line Road - and not through Cathedral Drive.
Along with this expanded parking, the Board approved converting the existing house at 18 Cathedral Drive as well as the existing one-story modular building behind the school into a child care center for faculty.
The school developers originally sought to legalize the banquet hall they previously claimed doesn't exist.
However, the buck stopped there due to heavy opposition from the neighbors who showed that the Township’s ordinances only permit banquet halls in schools in non-residential zoning districts.
Ultimately, the developers of the school buckled and withdrew their bid to legalize the banquet hall.
In a very unusual twist, the Board's attorney, engineer, and secretary, fought very hard to convince the Board that the use is permitted. All of their efforts were for nought.
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1 comment:
As per Pfeffer at this meeting, the school withdrew its application for the parking lot at 18 Cathedral Dr over 2 years ago. So the cars that have parked there since then and including today were/are there illegally. He LIED and stated to the best of his knowledge that the parking lot was not being used, yet stated later when discussing the sidewalk variance along county line rd that he traveled by this area everyday and there are fences all along the area. How do you notice a chain link fence that’s falling down behind this illegal parking lot, but not the 15 or so cars that park just on the other side of the same fence all day? He also forgot to mention that all of the fencing from kent to hope rds with the exception of one, belong to the school. He also LIED AGAIN when at this meeting he claimed there was no simcha hall, yet the owner of the school, Herskovits, admitted that there was one at the same meeting. The trailers were deemed legal by the board because according to the puppet show put on by Pfeffer and Herskovits what is there is a modular building, not trailers. Someone sitting near the front row pointed out to the board that according to the ordinance a modular building is treated the same as a trailer or any other temporary structure as per the ordinance, and instead of taking the two minutes to look up the ordinance (which he previously provided the number of) they shut him down and proceeded to vote and approve the daycare. They also allowed a shill for Herskovits to come in and falsely testify under oath that he represented 90% of the residents from his neighborhood who were all for the schools plans. Those residents, especially the guy from near the front row, let him have it loudly after the vote was done because nearly everyone from that neighborhood was against it. Finally the biggest question is, is it legal to pull a member from the zoning board (who is pro development as noted by his voting record) to sit on the planning board and have a vote when you don’t have enough planning board members to approve the application? What’s next, if you don’t have enough members to vote and can’t have a member of any other board available, you grab the janitor to vote so that you can get a predetermined result through?
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