Potentially, the Final Meeting to Preserve the Gateway to Holmdel
This Wednesday, after roughly a year away, Andrews Management and KIP 20 LLC will be back before the Holmdel Zoning Board of Adjustment to complete their presentation to justify ignoring the wishes of the voters of Holmdel to line their pockets by commercially developing land that our community has decided it wants to be left as it is. As low density residential and agricultural land. Please join us at the town hall for the Zoning Board meeting as it is likely that public comments will be possible at this time. The meeting agenda is here: https://www.holmdeltownship.com/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Agenda/_05202026-1163
As a family, we continue to oppose this development immediately adjacent to our family farm. We have chosen to raise our children here due to the unique and special character of this environment — not because it is a “less desirable neighborhood […] near the parkway.” This is why the Township Committee worked hard to preserve the Potter’s Farm property. As Mayor Impreveduto said:
“Once land is paved over it is lost forever.”
In my mind, this is about greed vs community. The developer has been able to purchase a lot of land that has been farmland since pre-colonial times at below “commercial rates” purely, and simply, because the price reflected the permitted use, as residential/agricultural land. They then ask not for a minor adjustment to favour practicality, which is the purpose of Zoning Variances, but for the Township to flagrantly ignore its own desires and rules and just permit rampant commercial development because Piscatelli and Kipniss want to get rich at the expense of others. The Township has allocated areas for Medical Office development — and quite sensibly they are adjacent to the Bay Shore Hospital complex on Beers Street — but land there would have cost $10 million not $1.2 million to buy, because it properly reflected the commercial valuation of the plot. Kipniss and Piscatelli are asking you to let them pocket a profit of $9 million because they want to use the land in a way that our community has not granted. Their private gain will be at the expense of all of us.
The environment around the site is not suitable for commercial use because it was never intended to be used that way. The traffic chaos that already exists will be multiplied, the massive septic load will go straight into the groundwater that serves water wells we use, the sky will be lit up even more by floodlights over the parking lot, the sightline will no longer be trees and shrubs but giant office buildings and parking lots, the wildlife will flee. Apart, that is, from the rodents that will cluster around the newly installed commercial garbage facilities.
Please join us on Wednesday to preserve the special bucolic nature of the Gateway to Holmdel, by expressing your opposition to this development to the Board when public comment is permitted, towards the end of the meeting.
