How to Address Warehouse Development in Your Town

By Kip Cherry • Central Jersey Conservation Chair

1. Contact your mayor and members of your council to express your concern. 
2. Encourage your mayor and council to make a request to the state Department of Transportation (DOT) for the preparation of an “access management plan” that will determine how best to handle the projected traffic.
3. Encourage your mayor to submit comments to DOT on the highway issues and make your own submission.
4. Write letters to the editor and opinion pieces expressing your concerns and making specific comments and suggestions about impacts, alternatives, and innovations that should be considered. Innovations might include computerized dispatch, the use of electric vehicles, and the production of solar power from expansive roof areas.
5. Organize residents of your community and enlist the aid of environmental advocates and labor unions. Monitor the conditions for planning board approval that may be voted on soon.
6. Gather information on the impacts of warehouse construction and share this information with decisionmakers in your community, including your mayor and council. Where you feel you lack information, file Open Public Records Act (OPRA) requests to obtain information on the status of applications before the NJ Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) relevant to the project. Also, file OPRA requests with the DEP for documents on various potential impacts, including stormwater, wetlands, toxic waste sites, historic sites, and threatened and endangered species.
7. Participate in the public participation process of your county planning board with a particular focus on the board’s areas of specific authority (i.e., county roads and drainage areas). Focus on road safety and congestion, stormwater flooding and stream contamination. (Note that county planning boards do not handle appeals of decisions by municipal planning and zoning boards. Such appeals are made to local courts. At the same time, violations of federal statutes, such as the Clean Water Act, are made to federal court).