CLOSTER — Members of the Planning Board discussed the revision of the town’s Master Plan the day after a public hearing that was held at a board meeting Oct. 30.
"There seems to be a general acceptance of the proposals," said Mayor Sophie Heymann.
While some officials agreed with Heymann’s assessment, others focused on language contained in the document. The revised draft is part of a larger process, which Planning Board members said they were hoping would be finished by Dec. 31.
John Lignos, chairman of the Planning Board, said the board hopes to adopt the re-examination of the Master Plan by its Dec. 3 meeting and move it forward to the mayor and council for their adoption prior to the Dec. 31 deadline.
However, Lignos said if the plans are not ready by Dec. 31, he does not want to see them rushed through to meet a specific deadline. There are no penalties for not complying by the end of the year, but the Borough would like to accomplish the task in a timely fashion because the re-examinations are required every six years, Heymann said.
Lignos said that the Planning Board and council would be better served to "get the details right" even if it means taking the process into next year.
Allowing the development of big box stores, such as Whole Foods or Wegman’s, was discussed with some favoring bringing these attractive stores into the community.
While it may be an "attractive" idea to bring high-quality supermarkets such as Whole Foods into Closter, it is not necessarily the easiest thing to do given square foot requirements from the Building Department, according to Planning Board member Robert Di Dio.
Whole Foods has stores in Ridgewood and Montclair, among other places.
Heymann pointed out that while most people would love to have a Whole Foods Supermarket, there would have to be extensive research done into the impact on traffic.
Joe Bianco, an urban planner and Closter resident, asked to have the word "redevelopment" struck from the revised draft of the re-examination of the Master Plan. Bianco said he preferred terms such as "restructuring or revitalizing" instead of redevelopment.
Di Dio understood Bianco’s concern but said, "If we are doing a plan for the future, even though urban blight doesn’t appear imminent, it is something that should be considered in terms of a long-term project."
Lignos, while he acknowledges and shares some of the concerns Bianco raised, does not like the idea of trying to intimidate the public.
"I don’t believe in scaring people," said Lignos, an architect. "My belief is that there is enough clarity in the ordinance, we have a clear Master Plan and capable people on the Planning Board. The idea of taking suburbia and turning into urbanity and blight seems like a stretch."
Heyman agreed with the Planning Board chairman.
"We don’t have urban blight," said Heyman in response to concerns about big box stores. "We don’t have a need for re-development or taking properties over by eminent domain. Those words raise red flags."
The bottom line is that some members of the community just wanted to preserve the bucolic feel of Closter. Irene Stella, the vice chairwoman of the Historic Preservation Committee, lauded the report but said it missed important details that mattered to the preservationists.
The committee plans to write a plan that stipulates the different houses to be protected to add to Preiss’s draft in the next several days. When Stella moved into the community, she found that the redeeming quality was the old-style Victorian homes and that is why preservation is so important to her.
