Montville has won — and lost — a legal battle pitting the town’s governing body against its own zoning board of adjustment in a dispute over a 266-unit senior housing proposal.
On Monday, a Morris County judge dismissed a complaint filed by the township committee alleging the zoning board had overstepped in granting several variances to the project. The lawsuit named the owner of the 29-acre property, Diversified Properties LLC of Montville, as a codefendant.
According to the committee, the zoning board’s September 2023 violated Montville’s master plan for development in town. It also usurped the township committee’s authority to regulate building by handing out a variety of variances, including permissions to build multi-dwelling units in an area zoned for single-family homes, an increase in maximum building heights from 35 feet to 57 feet and a tripling of the maximum retaining-wall height to 18 feet.
Housing under construction in Madison.
Additional variances or waivers were granted to accommodate the developer’s plans for tennis courts and lighting, setbacks between buildings and slope angles — all of it “exceeding the board’s statutory powers,” the committee said in its lawsuit.
Diversified’s collection of seven properties had been “specifically excluded” from a Senior Housing Overlay Zone created in the Master Plan, the committee argued.
But Judge Michael Gaus, ruling in state Superior Court in Morristown, saw things differently. In his June 30 decision, he affirmed the zoning board’s actions. The variances, “though numerous, were garden-type requests and not all atypical,” Gaus wrote. Montville’s master plan recognized the need for more senior housing, he added.
“Land-use boards have peculiar knowledge of their community” and have “a wide latitude in exercising their discretion,” Gaus wrote.
Former state Assemblyman Michael Patrick Carroll, an attorney representing the zoning board, said its members “felt that the applicant made a compelling case under the law, that the site was particularly suited to the proposed use.”
More: Why is this Morris County town suing itself? Blame a fight over big housing development
How will Montville committee respond?
Reached on Wednesday, Mayor Matt Kayne said the committee will meet with its attorney in executive session at its next meeting on July 22 “to discuss the legal options available to the township regarding this decision.”
The judge’s decision follows several years of controversy over the proposed project, which would fill vacant land bordered by River Road and routes 287 and 202. Those meetings included residents largely speaking out against the proposal.
One critic granted co-plaintiff status in the lawsuit, Neil Boyle, also saw his complaints dismissed by Gaus.
Montville’s township committee sued its zoning board, saying it had overstepped its authority in approving variances for development near River Road and Route 202.
“Following a thorough (and at times, contentious) year-long public debate involving nine public hearings, the board painstakingly reviewed voluminous testimony and evidence and thoroughly supported its action in a detailed, comprehensive, fact-sensitive, 53-page resolution,” the judge wrote.
Carroll said the board “carefully considered the views of the neighbors, but their discretion is limited, both by the law and the evidence presented before them.”
“Reasonable people could disagree about whether this might more appropriately have been dealt with by the governing body via a zone change request, but the majority [of board members] concluded that it met the precise definition of what the (d) variance process exists to accomplish: varying the ordinance where the circumstances on a particular, discrete site warrant it,” Carroll said.
The Diversified proposal comes with the promise to reserve 15% of the units to help the town satisfy its state-mandated affordable-housing obligations.
This article originally appeared on Morristown Daily Record: Morris County judge kills town’s lawsuit against its own zoning board