Warehousing Use Permitted At Somerville Lumber Property In Bridgewater
BRIDGEWATER, NJ — Warehouse use will continue to be allowed at the Somerville Lumber property in Bridgewater.
The Bridgewater Zoning Board of Adjustment voted to approve the use at its Nov. 28 meeting following a disagreement on whether the property was used for retail or warehouse.
The issue arose when Bridgewater’s Zoning Officer Roger Dornbierer ruled the property was retail with warehouse-type uses on-site. Somerville Lumber appealed this ruling in July with hearings in August and on Nov. 28.
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Attorneys for Somerville Lumber said “the Township’s historic treatment of the operation on the Property as a permitted use in the M-1A Zoning District unequivocally demonstrates that the Township viewed the principal uses of the Property as warehousing, storage, and manufacturing. The retail uses that existed on the Property were historically treated as permitted accessory uses (i.e., “limited retail uses subject to the requirement that they are accessory in size and scale to permitted uses”).”
On Nov. 28, Dornbierer pointed to a Courier News article published in 2018 which wrote about how Somerville Lumber rebranded itself into a Home Center.
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In the end, the zoning board granted a certificate of non-conformity so that the current use of building products storage was determined to be a principal warehouse use and the retail sales of these products is an accessory use to the warehousing of the building products.
Board Chairman Jeffrey Foose said he believed Dornbierer’s decision to label the property as retail was “100 percent correct… it was the right reaction due to the inundation of warehouse applications.”
“I am guilty of buying, most of us are guilty of buying online, and the logistics, the nature of that business is a warehouse-centric function,” said Foose. ” It’s a long-winded way of saying I am definitely in favor of this. But really I want to put on the record that the Zoning Officer really did the right thing. We needed to have a case, we needed to have evidence, witnesses.”
“Bridgewater is inundated with these cases and they don’t belong everywhere. They don’t belong next to senior living houses… and we want to protect those residents,” continued Foose.
Board member Pushpavati Amin concurred with Foose’s opinion.
“The way I look at this application is the building has been used for so many years as a warehouse… it changes back and forth, back and forth… technically this building has been used as a warehouse for 78 years now. Why do we have to deny this application when they are going to be using it for a similar type of purpose?” said Amin.
Ultimately, Somerville Lumber won its appeal with the majority of the Board approving it. Board Member Gary LaSpisa was the lone “no” vote.
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