By ELAINE VAN DEVELDE
Tinton Falls has authorized spending $100,000 to get the revised master plan on the books as soon as possible.
The Borough Council held a special meeting Tuesday night to adopt an ordinance that allows an emergency appropriation of funds to hire planners who will draft the ordinances necessary to put the new planning document into effect.
The appropriation, not to exceed $100,000, will go toward fees for planners Hyer & Gruel, of New Brunswick, who will craft the ordinances, and associated legal and engineering fees. No more than $62,000 of the $100,000 will go to Hyer & Gruel.
Hyer & Gruel is the firm that revised the master plan, which was recently approved by the Planning Board. Once it is approved by the board, the revised plan is then presented to council in the form of separate zoning ordinances to put the changes into effect. The ordinances undergo public and council scrutiny and are then put on the books, once they are sanctioned by both.
It only makes sense to use the same firm to draft the ordinances, said Borough Administrator W. Bryan Dempsey. They are the ones who wrote the plan with the revision recommendations, so they are more familiar than anyone with what needs to be done in the way of ordinances. This is just a formality, really.
At this point, Dempsey said, it should take Hyer & Gruel four to six months to get the ordinances done.
Officials are anxious to put a new master plan into effect. Hyer & Gruel held many public meetings on the plan and encouraged a lot of public input. They had called the boroughs original plan haphazard and said they had never seen so many different zones for a town the relatively small size of Tinton Falls.
The general consensus was that the public and officials both wanted to see more passive and active open space and controlled growth.
In particular, the Fort Monmouth area that extends into Tinton Falls is slated for a zone change that calls for mixed use, or a town center type use, including public uses, open space, offices and residences.
Another major change in zoning will occur in the current industrial/office park (IOP) zone on Shafto Road. The recommendation is to change it to age restricted housing. Mayor Peter Maclearie and Planning Board Chairman Joel Davies had said that the change would cause a major decrease in traffic influx, which is a problem in the area now.
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