Health & Fitness
The Route 53 Development Story, Continued
The battle over how many units to put on the old Pfizer property continues. How much is too much?
On Sept. 8, I wrote about the Kirkbride building, the former Greystone administration building facing demolition. In the course of that post, I mentioned the work on Route 53 in Morris Plains, where the old Pfizer buildings are coming down.
Turns out there is a lot more to the story.
I get weekly e-alerts from Morris Plains, and on Sunday the borough took the extraordinary step of putting out a statement "clarifying" an article in the Morris News Bee about the development.
It says, in part:
M&M partners, the developer of the site, presented their concept plan to the Borough and the Planning Board that included 500 units of housing. The Borough never agreed to this number. We believe it is too large and intrusive on our community. Subsequently, M&M sued the Borough asking for 800 units of housing to meet our Affordable Housing requirement. A requirement we believe the Borough has already met.
So in my post, I was incorrect in thinking the borough was considering 500 units of housing, along with retail, on what had been a solely commercial property.
This part, however, surprised me:
In talks with M&M we discussed Honeywell’s desire for a high end hotel on the development site. Honeywell has many national and international visitors to their headquarters. They use approximately 10,000 to 12,000 rooms per year. We are working with M&M to get a definitive answer to the hotel development before any retail or housing is added to the site.
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I am relieved Mayor Dretzler and the rest of the borough officials were as horrified as I at the thought of even 500 units of housing put on the site. If you have to put something on the site, I suppose one huge hotel is a lot less "intrusive" than what the developers have in mind.
If the developers can work with the borough and Honeywell and come up with a solution that lessens the impact on the rest of us, great.
But I think of those big hotels on Route 10 in Parsippany and I get an uneasy feeling. As usual, I hope for the best and expect the worst. That way I can be pleasantly surprised to be proved wrong.
Let's hope common sense and working together wins out over lawsuits and the dollar sign.
