Ridgewood Planning Board Meeting Minutes 20180815

The following minutes are a summary of the Planning Board meeting of August 15, 2017. Interested parties may request an audio recording of the meeting from the Board Secretary for a fee.

Call to Order & Statement of Compliance with the Open Public Meetings Act: Mr. Joel called the meeting to order at 7:40 p.m. Following members were present: MAYOR KNUDSEN, Joel Torielli, Richard Joel, Councilman Jeff Voigt, Melanie McWilliams, and David Scheibner. Also present were Christopher Martin, Esq., Board Attorney; Village Planner, Elizabeth Mc Manus; Village Engineer, Christopher Rutishauser, and Board Secretary Michael Cafarelli. Ms. Barto, Ms. Patire, and Ms. Altano were not present.

Public Comments on Topics not Pending Before the Board – None were reported

Correspondence received by the Board – MR. CAFARELLI reported a traffic report from Petry Traffic and a memorandum from the Village Manager about Companion Animal Pledge.

KS Broad Street, Preliminary and Final Major Site Plan, 76 & 80 Chestnut Street and 25-27 Franklin Avenue, Block 2005, Lots 11,12,13,14,15 – Adoption of Memorializing Resolution of Approval – The resolution was adopted as written.

257 Ridgewood Avenue, LLC, Block 3703, Lot 4, 6, & 8.01, Preliminary and Final Major Site Plan – Pubic Hearing continued from July 18, 2017 - Following is the transcript of the meeting, prepared by Laura A. Carucci, C.C.R., R.P.R.:

CHAIRMAN JOEL:  MR. BRUINOOGE, will you be ready? 
MR. BRUINOOGE:  We're ready.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Next item will be 257 Ridgewood Avenue, LLC, Block 3703, Lot 4, 6 and 8.01 preliminary and final major site plan public hearing continued from July 18, 2017. We previously heard this matter on July 18th, where we heard testimony from Michael Dipple, the engineer.  MR. BRUINOOGE is the attorney on the application.  So, MR. BRUINOOGE, you have the floor. 
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Thank you, Mr. Joel.  Subsequent to the hearing, the applicant filed with the village its revised plans, revised site plans and revised architectural.  Those plans were    the revisions were primarily occasioned as a consequence of meeting with the village planner and the village engineer, and as well as the comments made by the board members at the last hearing.  So Mrs. McManus was kind enough to review the revisions and in a very timely way yesterday provide us with a second review letter    I think a copy of the letter.  I think was addressed to the board. 

So in order to have a logical, he full rendered it and to keep this matter understandable, what I would propose is that we produce Mr. Dipple back, address the issues of the revisions, and as he does so he will comment with some specificity on the points raised and/or made by MS. McMANUS in her second review letter so that we can have it clear that the applicant has been responsive.  I'll state from the outset that for the most part, MS. McMANUS has, and we're grateful for this review, as I said, in a very timely way, compliance with her comments and with the observations and suggestions of the planner and the engineer, although we haven't had a chance because we just got the engineer's report this afternoon at around 4:30, quarter to 5, we have no comment on the engineer's report this evening. So Mr. Dipple is not only here, as we can see, setting up and ready to testify, but he's hopeful that he'll be out of here quickly because he has another matter over in New Milford that requires him to give testimony.  So with that I'll   
MR. MARTIN:  MR. BRUINOOGE.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Yes, sir.
MR. MARTIN:  Your witness remains sworn and also qualified.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Thank you.
MR. MARTIN:  In terms of the documents you referred to, I would just request that we mark MS. McMANUS report as Board 1.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  That's fine.
MR. MARTIN:  I believe that that board exhibit, I just looked through, I don't believe I have one yet.  (Whereupon, Report of MS. McMANUS is received and marked as Exhibit Board 1 for identification.)
MR. BRUINOOGE:  I believe that is correct.
MR. MARTIN:  And then Board 2 was MR. RUTISHAUSER's report from today.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Yes. (Whereupon, Report of MR. RUTISHAUSER is received and marked as Exhibit Board 2 for identification.) 
MR. MARTIN:  And if there's any reference to them, we can refer to them as Board 1 and  2. 
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Thank you very much. So Mike will get to it in a second.  I wanted you to know that we have two other proposed witnesses for this evening, Tom Toronto from United Way of Bergen County is here this evening and will go over some testimony with respect to special needs housing that the applicant proposes for this project.  Assuming we move along rapidly enough, I am hopeful that there will be sufficient time to at least start the testimony of Minno and Wasko the architects for the project, Mr. Bruce Englebaugh, who had the responsibility of the architectural work.  He is with us this evening as well.  If that all works, on September 19th we will back with Englebaugh, move on with traffic, and then move on with Burgis & Associates.  John Szabo is here this evening, but I suspect that John will be testifying back again in September.  So that's our game plan.  And with your kind cooperation, we'll move right along.
MR. MARTIN:  Also just filing of Mr. Keller's report, received by the Planning Board on July 21st.  We'll keep that until September 19th.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Yes.  I can state for the record that Keller has been in touch with John Jahr. 
I can't speak specifically as to the exchange of information and correspondence, but I know they've been communicating.  Hopefully we'll have some more from John Jahr and/or Mr. Keller.
MR. MARTIN:  Good.  Thank you.  Go ahead.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Thank you.
M I C H A E L    D I P P L E,    60 Grand Avenue, Englewood, New Jersey, having been previously sworn, continues to testify as follows: 
DIRECT EXAMINATION
BY MR. BRUINOOGE:
Q. So, Mike, even though Chris Martin has reminded you, I remind you once again you are under oath, and you're here this evening on behalf of the applicant, 257 RA.  You have in your hand a number of copies of some plans that your office revised at the applicant's request.  Is that correct?
A. Yes.  That's correct.  The revision date is August 2, 2017, revision No. 3.
Q. And those smaller versions, 11.5 by 17s, you're intending to hand those out to the board, I suppose.  Is that correct?
A. That's correct.
Q. Mike, are they true and accurate copies of the revised plans that were filed by your office with the village?
A. Yes, they're identical.
Q. Fine.  May we ask that they be handed to MR. CAFARELLI and distributed to the board?
MR. MARTIN:  You'll mark them? 
MR. BRUINOOGE:  We can mark it, sure. Well, hold on here a second, if you would, please. 
We did some pre marking last week    excuse me    last month.  And I have run into some flack, if you will, from my staff in having kind of gotten ahead of ourselves.  Some of the exhibits that were marked have, in fact, been revised and what I'm speaking about I'll reference them very specifically in a second, there were four or five exhibits that were utilized by Mr. Dipple.  They were    they were exhibits either his and in one or two instances the architect's plans.  I propose, MR. MARTIN, that to the extent that there has been reference to exhibits that were premarked and stuff got into the record at the last    at the July meeting, that we stick with the designation, okay.  But the revised plans and the exhibits submitted this evening I think should be marked a little differently.
MR. MARTIN:  I agree 100 percent.  So this latest handout is a revised plan.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  It is a revised plan.  And I would suggest that the plan, itself, should be marked as AR, Applicant Revised, and then whatever the number should be.  It should be the plan.
MR. MARTIN:  This is the site plan. 
MR. BRUINOOGE:  It is the site plan.
MR. MARTIN:  So I have A 1 as the site plan.  You want to mark this as AR 1? 
MR. BRUINOOGE:  I would suggest that that's a    that's how I think it makes the most sense. 
MR. MARTIN:  All right.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  I think it will read better, hopefully, in the transcript if we really have to do that.
MR. MARTIN:  Yes, as long as both sides understand, AR 1 is what we're going to mark right now.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Fine.  (Whereupon, Preliminary and Final Major Site Plan, Engineering Drawings, Revision 3, August 2, 2017 is received and marked as Exhibit AR 1 for identification.) 
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Mike, is marking it as AR 1.  We could go through the formality of having the court reporter mark it as well at the appropriate time. 
BY MR. BRUINOOGE: 
Q. Now, Mike, let's talk about AR 1.  What is it, and if you'd be kind enough to point out the changes that have been made? 
A. Okay.  AR 1 is a full copy of the site plan set entitled, "Preliminary and Final Major Site Plan."  It is Revision No. 3.  The revision note is addressed planner's report comments of May 12th, 2017.  And under miscellaneous revisions it is dated August 2, 2017.  And it consists of 14 sheets, C 01 through C 14. 
Q. As I indicated    pardon me    as I indicated earlier, the revisions come about as a consequence of comments made, received and dealt with    received from the village planner. 
Can you point out the changes and point out specifically the comments of where and how these plans address the comments made by MS. McMANUS?
A. Okay.  So I'm going to start with sheet C 03, and that is entitled, "Ground Floor Site Plan."
And if you refer to the smaller 11 by 17 copy, I think you can still see the red clouding of the changes.  And we were careful to make sure we picked up all of the changes, I believe. 
So if you look at this ground floor site plan, again, getting back to my testimony, this really only is the engineering for the ground level which is accessible off of North Maple Avenue from the east side of the building, so it doesn't have all of the improvements shown which are for the upper level which is accessible off of Franklin Avenue.  So a couple of the things that you can see on this level quickly are, I'm going to start over here on the left side, and we modified the tree planter sequence along North Maple Avenue that was one of the items that was discussed in the prior hearing, and we said that, you know, we identified that there was one tree missing, there's an opportunity for another planter, there are two planters in front of the building, now proposed building addition along North Maple.  So we end up with a series of five street trees along the North Maple Avenue frontage.  We've always had the municipal banding along    or the streetscape along the curb line so that didn't change.  We have a few things clouded which are more like sight distance and things like that that were incidental to not only some of the comments, but also just some of the minor modifications that were made with the planters and the handicapped ramps and things like that. 

Another major change that you can pick up on this sheet is a    the opportunity, we discussed, to have some kind of passive seating area in the northeast corner of the property, and we've done that.  And what you see on this sheet, because it's just the site plan and the engineering, and the landscaping comes in later, but you can see a brick pattern here (indicating) where we have an oval shaped seating area accessible on three sides from the municipal right of way from the entrance, the main entrance to the building.  And also we added a sidewalk to a doorway which could access to the ground level garage.  So I can pick up on more improvements there, but that was one of the things that we discussed that your planner presented in her letter.  And we discussed at the meeting and it made it onto the plans.  Another change was at this ground level we moved one of the parking spaces.  We had an opportunity to take out the very last parking space on the northeast corner of the ground level parking and move it over toward, I guess, the middle of the site near the two ADA accessible spaces, thereby allowing us a place to turn around, to perform a K turn, should someone come into that area and realize that, well, it's all full, so how do I get back out? 
So that was something that was discussed at the prior hearing I think extensively, so we addressed that by moving a space and just moving things very slightly in that area in order to accommodate that space.  So also on this sheet, and again, it kind of goes with the plan, but you'll see a number of clouded areas within notes, and you're going to hear more from the architect, but the floor area ratio changed slightly.  It's still compliant, but it changed slightly.  And he's going to tell you how that happened.  The recreational amenity was improved and that changes is on my zoning table.  We identified a few of the zoning issues that were brought up or compliance items that were brought up by MS. McMANUS, we added them to the plans.  If you recall, I discussed the height of the building and how we calculated that.  And we had a discussion after we submitted the plans last time with your planner, we've now added that.  I think we've come to agreement on the height calculation so we've added the height calculation to that.  In our zoning table we clarified that special needs housing does require two spaces.  I had testified that my plan showed 140 required, it's now 141.  So there were two spaces.  And, you know, there's a few other waivers and variances that were brought up. The building signage table was added to the plans.  You're going to hear more on that from the architect regarding building signage.  So we showed compliance with the code there.  And then I'm going to    you'll notice a couple of signs were added for right turn only and that really moves me to the next sheet, which is C 04, which is the portion of the site that's accessible from Franklin Avenue. 

So now we're one level up again and we're coming in off of Franklin Avenue where we're faced with this parking area and then accessibility into the residential units which are the upper floors, and I think the most notable change here is what we discussed that we have right in and right out onto Franklin Avenue, and that was a point that we made in the hearing in July last time.  So these signs are related to the change to the driveway.  It's a pretty narrow driveway opening, but we were able to put a small island there and add the proper signage in order to accommodate only right in and right out.  So there's not a lot of    not a lot of clouding on that sheet.  When we move on to the grading, drainage and utility plan, we added the average grade point locations which was something that your planner had asked us to do, and that was an exhibit that I brought at last hearing, I think it was A 5.  And that showed how we calculated the height    A 4, my apologies.  So we added that to the plan.  That was a last minute change before the    before prior hearing and that shows up on the plans (indicating).  It carries over onto sheet C 06, where we show those average grade point locations, as discussed in I believe agreed to with your planner as to how to actively calculate the    the average grade.  Moving onto C 07, which is entitled, "Ground Floor Lighting and Landscaping Plan," we modified the lighting entirely.  This is one point in your planner's letter that we haven't quite come to full agreement on yet.  So lighting is tough.  You put the lights up, and you try not to get the spill.  You try to pull them back a little bit.  We have very little spillage of light onto the neighboring properties.  It essentially occurs in the rear where we have two building mounted fixtures trying to light this sidewalk that I discussed going from the lower parking lot up to the upper level, up the stairs, and we get a little incidental lighting spillage over onto the municipal parking lot. 
So while we recognize that, we're trying to make sure that that's a safe area because you're down in a walkway with a retaining wall on one side and a building on the other, so we're going to try to keep that well lit and keep it at a height that those lights won't be vandalized, and that does end up with a little bit of spillage on the back side, you know, at least at this level.  And this is, again, I'm on the ground level now, I've moved onto 07, which is the ground level. 
And the other    one of the other improvements you can see now a little more clear is the landscaping which is associated with that passive seating area along North Maple Avenue. 
We still have the ornamental trees.  We added two benches, brick sidewalk.  We have a number of different plantings that are listed here.  And I believe, if I'm correct, I think your planner concurred that that addresses that comment satisfactorily.  And I think we're    you know, we invite any comments or any criticism of that design, but I think we've    we've provided something in the front. 

There are some other landscaping changes on this set of plans.  We're using LED fixtures, getting back to the lighting, I'm sorry I'm skipping around, but we're using LED fixtures.  And we incorporated some of those.  I think some of the fixtures we had on the prior plan, a little bit outdated and may not be available in the way we had them on the plan anymore, they carried over from the prior submission to the Board of Adjustment, so we updated that.  Moving on to the first floor lighting and landscaping plan, some additional landscaping was added in the rear to shield the parking spaces.  And, again, you get a little bit of light spillage onto the    off of funeral home parking area, and that's caused by these two lights (indicating) which light this access way.  We can work on that.  It's very minimal.  I see it's .5 or .4, a couple .2s, and that's an illumination level in footcandles on the ground surface.  So I'm going to work with your planner on that going forward to try to maybe use even a lower wattage light, we're going to stick with the height and try to reduce it a little bit.  I still have to provide the safety for the people that are using these spaces, and that's where I kind of get into trouble there.  I got to kind of get the front of the spaces to the right level, but 4 feet later I got to keep it to a lower level.  So I'm working on that.  And that comment remains outstanding with your planner.  I think the rest of it is fairly just, you know, details and soil erosion and sediment control, so    I don't know if I've missed anything.  Looking at your planner's review letter   
MR. MARTIN:  Mr. Dipple, let me just    
THE WITNESS:  Yes.
MR. MARTIN:     because I'm keeping score.  C 05, was that a grading or   
THE WITNESS:  C 05 sounds like a grading plan, yes.
MR. MARTIN:  Does that also carry to C 06.
THE WITNESS:  C 05 is the ground floor and C 06 is the first floor.  They're both grading plans, yes.
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  Could I ask a question?
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Chris    excuse me, Mike.  I'm sorry, ma'am.
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  Can you just explain that in the upper right hand, there are some changes there?
THE WITNESS:  On C 06, in the upper   
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  Yes, would you go through that again? 
THE WITNESS:  We changed that driveway to right in and right out only.
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  Oh, okay.  So that's the change. 
THE WITNESS:  Yeah.  And    and there's incidental changes with this with some of the grading and, you know, so we just clouded the whole area. 
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  Thank you. 
BY MR. BRUINOOGE: 
Q. Mike, I think the one thing I'd like you to focus on is comment 2.30, page 5 of MS. McMANUS second review letter, recreational and social amenities.  And it indicates in the comments, her comment was satisfied, there was some additional square footage added.  Could you point that out, please?
A. I don't have it in front of me.  My apologies, page 5? 
Q. Page 5 and the top of paragraph 2.2    paragraph is marked 2.2 recreational and social amenities.
A. Yes. 
Yes, I think you're    you're going to hear more from the architect about that, but, yes, before this resubmission we were relying on a bike rack and kind of using the area as part of the recreation and social amenity.  I think it was agreed upon that we can do better than that. 
We came back with an additional recreation room on the upper floor.  And I don't want to give MR. ENGLEBAUGH's testimony, but that was satisfied by providing more amenity space in the building. 
MR. BRUINOOGE:  I have no further questions of Mr. Dipple at this time. 
I'm certain he's ready and willing to answer your questions.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Okay.  Jeff, do you have any questions for Mr. Dipple?
COUNCILMAN VOIGT:  Yes.  It's related    it's actually related to the tree wells. 
We have    we have an issue in our town where we have trees on    I'll just say on Ridgewood Avenue, and the tree wells that we have are really kind of brick and enclosed and they have a tree in them and all of this kind of almost, like, concrete now, it's actually dirt.  Those tree wells that we have in town don't work very well, and I'm hoping that when you design the tree wells for this particular building it allows water to actually permeate into the trees.  The ones that we have right now in the town, they don't allow trees to get any water really, and the trees end up dying.  So if you can just make a note and ensure that any kind of tree well you put in the front of these, in front of the building, it actually allows water to permeate within the tree itself.
THE WITNESS:  Okay, yes.
COUNCILMAN VOIGT:  Thank you.
THE WITNESS:  Understood.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Is that it, Jeff? 
COUNCILMAN VOIGT:  Yeah, it is.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Okay.  Thanks.  Dave? 
MR. SCHEIBNER:  No questions.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Susan? 
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  I'm good.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Okay.  Melanie? 
MS. McWILLIAMS:  Yes, I want to inquire, you were    you were satisfied with the new outdoor amenity area, that met your request for your original concerns? 
MS. McMANUS:  Yes, yes.  The area along North Maple Avenue with the    I'm sorry, the area along North Maple Avenue, I'm pleased to see they've incorporated that area with the two benches, some plantings.  I think it will be a nice    a nice place for residents or even other passersby's to take a seat.  One thing that I was noticing that I didn't include in the    in my review memo, but just a condition of any approval that the board is inclined to grant should include review of any street furniture such as the two benches shown to the satisfaction of the village engineer and the board planner, just to make sure that it is essentially consistent with other streetscape furniture that you see in downtown.  And it is of a quality that the professionals can support and for aesthetic reasons as well. 
THE WITNESS:  We agree to that, yes.  Absolutely.
MS. McWILLIAMS:  The only other question I have is the light spillage.  You're still working on that with how the    I just want to make sure I understood correctly if that's still something that's under review, how that's going to spill over into the funeral home parking lot and how that will    you know, do you have any level for safety   
THE WITNESS:  Yes.  We were    we were in a bit of a rush, I will    I will admit.  But, yes, it's difficult.  I've got to, like I said, you know, the width of this table, I've got to get the right amount of light here, but not too much over there (indicating).  And it's    it's not easy with the products that are available.  But, yes, I will work on it to try to reduce the spillage and come to some agreement with your planner as to    as to how that works.  I think it can be improved upon, especially in that area.  I'll do my best, but it's a municipal parking lot, but I would think that that would only    these are very low light levels to begin with, .5 footcandle that would really only help, you know, that situation.
MS. McWILLIAMS:  Okay.  Thank you.  That's all I have.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Joel? 
VICE CHAIRMAN TORIELLI:  No comments.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Okay.  I don't have any either. 
The board professionals?  Chris, do you have any questions? 
MR. MARTIN:  MR. RUTISHAUSER, raise your right hand.
Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God? 
MR. RUTISHAUSER:  Yes, I do.
C H R I S T O P H E R    R U T I S H A U S E R,  having been duly sworn, testifies as follows: 
MR. MARTIN:  MR. BRUINOOGE, you stipulate to MR. RUTISHAUSER as a professional engineer? 
MR. BRUINOOGE:  I do.
MR. RUTISHAUSER:  Thank you. 
I don't know if this is the right opportunity, but the applicant has submitted drawings and information for a major soil permit that this project would require one if it was so approved. 
How do you want    how do you want to deal with that, MR. BRUINOOGE? 
MR. BRUINOOGE:  It's the subject of a separate hearing. 
MR. MARTIN:  You don't want to include it with this application. 
MR. BRUINOOGE:  I'd be more than happy to discuss it with you, MR. MARTIN, and the engineer. Yes, clearly, it's got to be addressed and dealt with.  But Mr. Dipple is not prepared to testify or deal with that this evening.
MR. MARTIN:  Good point.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Well, he can speak about it more or less generally, but go ahead. 
THE WITNESS:  I could speak in generality.  If you'd like I mean should I    should I do that now?
MR. RUTISHAUSER:  Well, yeah, I mean, you prepared a drawing, cut and fill drawing.  You submitted your volume calculations.  I have taken a look at them.  I find them to be reasonable and representative of the intended work.  It's just that as part of the major soil process    permit process, this board has to include its approval with its actions, and then that will be followed up by resolution to the governing body, the Mayor and Council.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Right.  If that's what the ordinance requires, then that's what the applicant is more than happy to comply with.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  He just mentioned it just so you don't have to come back later and lose time.  So he mentioned it as a courtesy   
MR. BRUINOOGE:  I'm sure it's all mentioned in the spirit of good will.  And we accept it that way. 
MR. MARTIN:  And I think the notice    the notice will allow for that.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Okay.
MR. RUTISHAUSER:  It's just that Mr. Dipple is here, he has submitted the information.  I find it acceptable.  If the board members have any questions on it, I think Mr. Dipple and myself could try to answer them to the best of our abilities.
MR. MARTIN:  And if there's anything more specific you could work that out with MR. RUTISHAUSER, correct. 
THE WITNESS:  Yes.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  I think, I guess the only question I would have, MR. MARTIN, is whether or not we need to bring Mr. Dipple back for specific testimony that flow from the conversation with the village engineer, as to whether or not the board requires additional testimony.
MR. MARTIN:  Well, at the time that the village engineer testifies as to his overall view of the application, if there's anything that he believes is in    in disagreement, then we may have to bring him back.  Otherwise, the board could go with a recommendation, if they choose, of the village engineer.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Fine.  So as long as we're clear that there's a complete application.  He's satisfied with Mr.    village engineer.  And we'll incorporate it, therefore, into the application pending before the board for site plan review, preliminary and final site plan. 
MR. MARTIN:  Yes.  Subject to them finalizing the issue, yes.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Thank you. 
MR. RUTISHAUSER:  But nothing further because I would like to give the applicant an opportunity to review the memo I prepared and sent out this afternoon.  I apologize for its lateness, but that's how it is sometimes.
MR. MARTIN:  And the same thing on that if there's any disagreements.  If not, he doesn't have to come back. 
MR. BRUINOOGE:  We didn't think that he waited    you know, he could have waited until 6:00, 4:30 this afternoon.  I'm only kidding.  We understand how it works and we're not at all offended by the hour or the day we got the reports.
MR. MARTIN:  MR. RUTISHAUSER is working for the village. 
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Thank you. 
MR. RUTISHAUSER:  Nothing further. Thank you.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Okay. 
Beth, did you have any questions? 
MS. McMANUS:  I have    I have just one question.
MR. MARTIN:  Can I swear you in.
MS. McMANUS:  Sure.
MR. MARTIN:  Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God?   
MS. MCMANUS?  I do.
E L I Z A B E T H   M c M A N U S,   Having been duly sworn, testifies as follows:
MR. MARTIN:  And, MR. BRUINOOGE, do you stipulate to MS. McMANUS professional qualifications? 
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Most definitely.
MR. MARTIN:  Go ahead.
MS. McMANUS:  So the majority of my comments have been satisfied.  There are a couple of outstanding items which I think are more appropriate for the architect when he provides testimony.  The one outstanding item that I think would be appropriate for Mr. Dipple, if    am I correct in assuming that the sight triangles along Ridgewood Avenue will be provided? 
THE WITNESS:  They are    there are some on the plans.  It's not on the sheet that I have in front of me; however, yes, because we're generally still working with Bergen County.  And they're very specific about their sight triangles that    that    yes, right, that we    that we just want to make sure we got them really kind of from them.  It's their right of way.  So I do believe they're on there, I believe sight distance is on there.  But, yes, without a doubt, it can be a condition and we will comply with that request. 
MS. McMANUS:  Okay.
THE WITNESS:  To your satisfaction.
MS. McMANUS:  Thank you.  That's all the questions.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Next will be the public. 
Does the public have any questions of Mr. Dipple? 
(No response.) 
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Seeing no questions from the public, then you can call your next witness.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Thank you, Mr. Dipple.  Good luck in New Milford.
THE WITNESS:  Thank you.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Thank you, Mr. Dipple.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  MR. TORONTO, please.  If the board doesn't mind, I'll take a seat next to MR. TORONTO. 
MR. MARTIN:  MR. TORONTO, raise your right hand. Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God? 
MR. TORONTO:  I do.
T O M    T O R O N T O,  6 Forest Avenue, Paramus, New Jersey, having been duly sworn, testifies as follows:
MR. MARTIN:  And for the record just state your full name and your business address.   
MR. TORONTO:  Sure. My name is Tom T O M, Toronto, T O R O N T O.  I am President of Bergen County's United Way, 6 Forest F O R E S T Avenue, in Paramus, New Jersey.
MR. MARTIN:  MR. BRUINOOGE.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Thank you, MR. MARTIN. 
DIRECT EXAMINATION
BY MR. BRUINOOGE: 
Q. And thank you, MR. TORONTO, for being here. 
Would you be kind enough to provide the board with a brief overview of your background, your affiliation, your work experience, and then we'll use that as a segue into a little bit about your organization. 
A. Sure, MR. BRUINOOGE. 
It's a pleasure to be here before the planning board in Ridgewood.  Organizationally, we've been very interested in developing special needs housing here in Ridgewood, working with your Access For All Committee, members of the governing body, the planning board and other professionals for some    some time.  So it's a pleasure to be before you.  I've been employed by Bergen County's United Way since 1985.  I've been president of Bergen County's United Way since 2002.  For the last 12 years our organization has been committed as principally, a sole focus, to developing affordable housing with a particular passion, I would say, for developing what's known as supportive housing for individuals with special needs.  Towards that end we have completed over 40 projects ranging from the stick built group homes to redevelopment of existing ranch homes into group homes, to right now pending an 85 unit senior housing and special needs housing project in Fair Lawn. We've developed several projects surrounding Ridgewood, so to speak.  We are    have built several projects in Allendale and Ramsey.  We're building a group home, a stick built group home in Glen Rock.  We're hoping to start construction this fall.  We're at work with the Borough of HoHoKus for affordable housing in the downtown in that community.  And we are site plan approved and will begin work this fall also with a group home and independent living apartments in the Borough of Wyckoff, and many other communities throughout Bergen County and outside of Bergen County as well. 
Q. Given that history and the deep involvement that both you and your organization have, the commitment to special needs housing and affordable housing, you've entered into an understanding with 257 RA, the applicant that's before the board this evening.  Is that correct?
A. That is correct, MR. BRUINOOGE.
Q. And you're aware that what the applicant is proposing is to take a portion of what we sometimes refer to in this process as the existing Sealfons' building and repurpose a portion of that to accommodate the special needs housing that you and John Saracino on behalf of 257 RA have discussed.  Is that so?
A. That is correct.
Q. Tell the board, if you will, what you understand the project would be vis à vis the special needs housing. 
A. Sure.  It's our intention to take the entire    what is currently the entire second floor of the former Sealfons' site and convert that into special needs housing, individual apartments, some two bedroom apartments, to serve folks with special needs, particularly with developmental disability, in a supportive housing environment. Developmental disabilities is a broad cross section that is defined by the State of New Jersey that can include people with MS, cerebral palsy, autism, Down's Syndrome, even survivors of domestic violence.  In this particular development what we're planning to do is to focus on folks with developmental disabilities similar to the definition and diagnosis of the folks that we serve in the neighboring communities. In fact, many of the    I shouldn't say many, but we have tenants currently in our projects outside of Ridgewood who are    who grew up here in Ridgewood and now live in Allendale or Ramsey or in North Mahwah, who are very familiar with and keep an active database of parents, adult parents, or rather parents of adult children with developmental disabilities.  And one of the drivers of folks who have special needs children who reach adulthood is what will happen to their child when they're no longer here.  So the strong desire for safe, affordable, supportive housing, hopefully in the community where their adult child may have grown up is absolutely essential. With that in mind, we are aware of parents in Ridgewood and the surrounding area, I might add parenthetically that when we do our applicant    develop our applicant pool, we follow fair housing standards, but one of the obligations that we have as the landlord is to make sure that the folks who live in the communities that we build can live safely and securely, so we look for strong local area networks of support, possibilities for employment, transportation, et cetera.  So the combination of the families that we have in our database, the input that we have received from the many times that I've spoken to your Access For All Committee here in Ridgewood, and by the way, as you know, the village has led the way in terms of development of those Access For All Committees, we know that we would develop a very strong and robust applicant pool of people from Ridgewood, some of whom are known to us, so we would like to tailor the development to best fit the needs of the local constituents, who are at large, for this section of Bergen County. 
Q. Is it fair to say that what you've just described is really, I suppose, an expression of how the proposed special needs housing fits into the community of Ridgewood, this village?
A. As I mentioned at the outset, my excitement at being here before the Planning Board is really the realization of a dream that we've had.  The village is an extraordinary community.  It's an extraordinarily welcoming community.  It's a community that has extraordinary amenities.
So the ability for us and something we've always been interested in developing is kind of the top of the shops model, if you will, that allow folks to walk to recreation, employment opportunities, educational opportunities, transportation.  And this community is extraordinary, and this particular location is absolutely extraordinary, for our smaller community and integrated to the larger community, to take advantage of all the benefits that the village has to offer.
Q. Based on your understanding of the relationship you have with the property owner, in this case the applicant/developer, do you recall the number, maximum number of units and the number of beds that we expect to find in the project, should it be approved? 
A. Sure.  We're looking to create eight units and 15 bedrooms within that second floor space.  We've been working with Bruce, the architect from Minno and Wasko.  There are certain considerations from a design perspective, of course, that need to be considered for the population to be served and really for any population that's going to be living on a second story, which is to be fully sprinklered, have two forms of egress, mid ingress, to have an elevator retrofitted to be able to accept gurneys in case someone has to be removed by ambulance. 
And I might add when I state that remark that, well, that's a stipulation of the state.  None of the projects that we've completed in any of the communities where we have been, have experienced any additional police, fire or emergency calls by virtue of them being there. 
One of the things that we have to work with is that this is a time of some transition for the State of New Jersey in terms of how it plans, support plans and supports and licenses, supportive housing.  One of those considerations which I think is actually quite good for individuals is a real demand, if you will, that independence, choice, all the characteristics of residential living for folks with special needs should absolutely mimic the same kind of living arrangements that you or I might have.  So we're working with the State of New Jersey. And by the way, the site has been visited twice by the state architect and approved for the use.  It's also been visited several times by the State Department of Developmental Disabilities, and that is a state agency that provides support budgets to individuals to be able to live with some independence in local communities, and they're thrilled with the site as well.  So we are working on a more fluid design to make sure that the characteristics ones we have control of the space and can begin to retrofit, mirror the still evolving regulations and requirements that the State Department of Developmental Disabilities is developing.  That said, we do know, based on conversations with the state, that they are fully in support and embrace the model and the location of this particular housing.
Q. Now, based on the project as you conceive it now, as it's been discussed, and based on the understanding that you have with the developer, how many staff people would you expect would be on site?  And if you can give some understanding to the board as to how they function, whether it's a 24 hour day staff facility or just what goes on there.
A. Sure.  As I mentioned earlier, there is a new dynamic in terms of    in terms of state government and their approach to how houses or residences like the one that we are proposing are supported.  Think of individuals living in a    in their own apartment with some level of support that comes in the form of a variety of different services, some of which may be accessed where they live in their apartment, some of which may be accessed out in the community.  There's not going to be a staff, no    no staff will live in these apartments.  There may be, depending upon the specific individuals who live there, a wake staff overnight who are there to monitor and make sure that folks, if they are up in the middle of the night, know where they're going, know what to do.  We may require that level of support.  But really it's going to be driven by the particular diagnosis and needs of the individuals living there with    yes? 
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  Can you speak into the microphone?  I'm having a hard time hearing you.
THE WITNESS:  Sure.  So it's going to be driven by the diagnosis and the specific needs of the individual with an emphasis on independence and the ability of that individual to take advantage of the amenities and what the Village of Ridgewood has to offer as a place to live. 
So, typically, what you'll see is that these apartments will behave like any other apartments that you have in Ridgewood.  Folks typically are not home during the day.  If you visit any of our projects in other communities you would find for the most part empty parking lots because folks are out either at work, at day programs or activities.  By the way, that includes the weekend.  The recreational opportunities and the    the folks    the time that folks spend going to a Yankees game, a Mets game or a Broadway show is extraordinary to me.  So there's a real dynamism to these projects in terms of people being outside. 

At night folks come back, they will prepare a meal.  Sometimes that meal will be prepared with a support person.  And there will be    they'll be going out to the movies in Ridgewood, out to eat in Ridgewood.  Our projects tend to be little economic development engines, if you will, and the folks who live in them become known to the shopkeepers throughout the community.
BY MR. BRUINOOGE: 
Q. How many staff do you expect will be on site in any 24 hour period?
A. Well, it could be    it could be    it's hard to say, MR. BRUINOOGE.  It could be at night a minimum of two people would be in the apartment.  During the day it could be, you know, very transitional.  It could be four, five, six folks there for a limited period of time until folks are up and out and on to their employment activities or other day service programs that they might visit.
Q. Would the staff have an office on site?
A. No.  We're    we don't build staff offices.  And that's very purposeful because, again, the staff are not there to sit at a desk and    they're really there to be in a dynamic relationship with the tenants and with their client.  We will do, as I said, folks may even have at home at the end of the kitchen counter, you know, we might have a build in, you know, standing desk, for example.  We'll have some file space.  But pretty much these are not facilities.  These are not institutions.  These are apartments.
Q. Based on experience, how will your staff, you know, get to the project?  Will they be driving, or do you find that they tend to use other forms of transportation? 
A. Well, we find it's a mixed bag.  In some cases    we are not service providers.  We contract with service providers, you know, for example, a well known Ridgewood institution, Children's Aid and Family Services is a    one of our service providers. We just completed a group home in Mahwah where they are the service provider.  We retrofitted a ranch home in Montvale, six bedrooms, where they are the service provider, so they're    they're well known to us.
I'm not suggesting they will be, but they could be.  And in those circumstances, one of the benefits, so to speak, in terms of this location is its public transportation accessibility. 
So some of the staff, and that's what we look for typically in a project, to be on a transit line, both for the benefit of the tenants and also for the ability of staff members to use public transportation to get to their jobs.  In some cases staff come with a van to pick up a particular tenant and take them to their activities.  In some cases the staff car pool.  In some cases there are    the agency has a staff man, if you will, that drops and picks up people.  Sometimes we have that. So as Mr. Dipple testified, we're comfortable with two parking spaces. We doubt that there's going to be anyone sitting in their car or a van sitting in that parking space for any extended period of time.  We have done some studies of our    of all of our projects and what we find is that for every ten residents we might have one resident who drives a car.  Because of this particular location our bias would be to not have tenants necessarily who need a car, but rather tenants who make use of public transportation and also walk to amenities.
Q. I know that the village, as expressed by the village planner, there's a concern that the project be occupied by individuals who are at a certain income level. 
A. Um hmm.
Q. And based on your experience, can you tell the board just what you expect the income level of the residents of this proposed project would be. 
A. Sure, MR. BRUINOOGE.  Our experience has been that our tenants typically, for supportive housing, qualify under the low or very low income standard.  And I might add that we are responsible as a landlord and sponsor for the projects that we have developed, to handle all of the regulatory compliance and the affordability certifications on an annualized basis. 
We do that in collaboration with municipalities where our projects exist, but it's not our expectation nor would it be a responsibility of the village to certify that on that basis.  That's our function. 
Q. In other words, based on your comment, and the response that you just gave, administration of the project would be your    your responsibility    
A. Correct.
Q.    not the village's?
A. That's correct. As well as the property, you know, we also are responsible as property managers for the project and would be, you know, and that would be a    you know, a conversation which we've already had with Mr. Saraceno as principal of Onyx. 
The property maintenance in terms of this particular location obviously are pretty minimal, but where we own a piece of property where we have landscaping, snow removal and other kinds of requirements, property management deals with that.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  I have no further questions of MR. TORONTO at this time. 
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Okay.  Thank you. 
Jeff, do you have any questions?
COUNCILMAN VOIGT:  No.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Dave? 
MR. SCHEIBNER:  No questions.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Susan? 
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  So first, thank you, Tom.  Thank you. 
THE WITNESS:  Thank you.
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  So as the Village Council liaison to the Community Access Network I was thrilled to be able to bring to our last meeting this particular application and share with the members of the Community Access Network that the possibility of some special needs housing was very much on the horizon.  And we look forward to this opportunity. Needless to say we see this is an exciting change and overwhelmed with the emotion was very, very significant. 
What I wanted to ask you is if you didn't mind, the developmental disabilities, and I know you and I have had this discussion about the different levels and the mixing of different types of disabilities and when it works and when it doesn't work.  And it strikes the right balance.
But if you wouldn't mind just going over the different types of developmental disabilities that might be    that this might be open to.  So if you don't mind, and just with autism spectrum, what kind of disabilities are in that list. 
THE WITNESS:  There's, I believe, 177 different diagnoses.
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  You don't have to go through all of them   
THE WITNESS:  I could go through   
MAYOR KNUDSEN:    just a sample if you don't mind. 
THE WITNESS:  Sure.  Of course. So we have tenants who have autism, tenants with Asperger's.  We have tenants with cerebral palsy, with MS, Down's Syndrome.  We have folks who have hearing loss, sight issues, so those are typical.  What we don't have are folks with any who are ex offenders or who have had drug abuse issues or things of that nature.  So this is not    this is not    this is a very defined and discreet population that we serve.  In some cases Veterans also qualify for special needs housing.  And not to belabor the point, but as I mentioned, in Allendale we started one project which led to a second project which led to a third project which led to a fourth project, which I think underscores to a certain extent, the sense of partnership that we have with individual municipalities.  And the latest project that has been approved in Allendale will be two single family homes, three bedrooms each, that we are building for what we expect will be a wounded Veteran and family, and that will qualify under the special needs category right now for the State of New Jersey.  And I would also add, again, not to go on and on, but, you know, it is our hope and expectation and we, of course, will work with MS. McMANUS to make sure that the Village, to the extent that it was eligible, would receive the bonus credits, if you will, for bedrooms produced for affordable housing for folks with special needs.  So we will be particularly careful to make sure that the tenant selection was in conformity with that eligibility to the extent that it exists for the village. 
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  Thank you. 
Just in terms of when you said that, you know, you were looking at Ridgewood specifically, look at the needs in Ridgewood, and you suggested that there is that database.  So you can actually identify from that database where our greatest need would be? 
THE WITNESS:  Well, there    we    we are familiar with many Ridgewood families right now.  So we would, of course, we seek to develop a very robust applicant pool.  So we spread the word out through social service agencies that serve the population through the parent network, through a variety of organizations like the Supportive Housing Association for the State of New Jersey, plus, of course, the State's Department of Developmental Disability to activate as many folks as possible.  One of the things that we look to do and, in fact, and what we have found in our experience is that because of the nature of the individual that would be a tenant, that they tend to come from a very tight drive shed, if you will, to use a planning term, I suppose.  And that's quite understandable.  So what we would expect, I could    I could be wrong, but what we typically find is that it's the local municipality that we're building in that the applicant pool is most representative of.  And then the contiguous towns that surround it because there's a comfort level, in terms of families particularly, to be able to get to their adult child and not to drive quite a distance.  As we have developed more and more projects, you know, we are finding that that drive shed increases a little bit, but pretty much it's very, very drawn from a very local town sort of cluster.
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  Okay.  Thank you.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Melanie? 
MS. McWILLIAMS:  Hi.  Thank you so much. 
Just a couple of questions.  Is it required for those who are able, physically fit, to get out of the    out of the, you know, out on their own, are they    are they    is there any sort of requirement for having employment for living in    in the dwelling? 
THE WITNESS:  There's not a    there's not a requirement, so to speak, but what we look for in terms of tenant selection is a fit between what the particular characteristics are and where the project is located, the ability of the individual tenant to be able to be involved in part of the community, to take advantage of amenities.  What we're    what we're thinking about because of this location is that we're looking for    we'd be looking for an applicant pool that has the ability to take advantage of what the village has to offer.  In some other projects that we located in more remote locations, for example, in Ramsey and the project    we have two that are going on, but the first project that we did in Ramsey was actually the first time in the country, purpose built housing for folks with autism.  So this served a particularly high need autistic population.  By virtue of where this project was located, folks would not be walking the downtown or being able to take advantage of amenities, so to speak.  So the quiet, more remote location made sense to serve that population because it was a very contained project. 
Not to say that people do not go out, but they go out escorted and cared for.  So an example of where that site would not make sense for someone who wants to walk to the Dunkin' Donuts or the Starbucks or walk to a movie or walk to employment because it wasn't possible at that location. 
MS. McWILLIAMS:  The varying    and I think you went over, you know, the 177 possible diagnoses that, you know, fit in your    in your guys wheel house.  Do any of them fall under the psychiatric disorder umbrella at all? 
THE WITNESS:  No.  That    there are    there is a    folks who are developmentally disabled are a discreet population and do not have a mental health diagnosis.
MS. McWILLIAMS:  Understood.  I didn't know in 177, if that would also qualify.  I just wanted to ask. 
THE WITNESS:  No.  What we're proposing is support housing for folks with developmental disabilities. 
MS. McWILLIAMS:  Okay.
THE WITNESS:  Not to say that we would not do or have not done supportive housing for folks with mental illness, we have and will, but this is not what's the proposed use here. 
MS. McWILLIAMS:  But no here.  Okay.
In the eight units and 15 bedrooms, how many tenants do you    with any sort of developmental delays or how many tenants in general do you expect to live in each of the eight units?  I know there's 15 bedrooms   
THE WITNESS:  Well, there will be 15   
MS. McWILLIAMS:     so 15 total   
THE WITNESS:  Correct. 
MS. McWILLIAMS:  Okay.
THE WITNESS:  Yes.  Each person will have their own individual bedroom. 
MS. McWILLIAMS:  Okay.
THE WITNESS:  And the site's mixed right now in terms of two bedroom units or four bedroom units is what we are negotiating, if you will.
MS. McWILLIAMS:  Okay.
THE WITNESS:  In the spirit of collaboration with the State of New Jersey based on what they, you know, what their    what their new outlook    in the spirit of what their new outlook is trying to achieve. 
MS. McWILLIAMS:  I think my only other question was something along the lines of van pickup and bus pickups and numbers of those per day per tenant, but I think I'll get to that later on maybe with the safety testimony.  Thank you.
THE WITNESS:  No, you're welcome.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Joel? 
VICE CHAIRMAN TORIELLI:  No questions, thank you.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Okay.  When you do the review or the state did the review were there any deficiencies at all that needed to be addressed at all? 
THE WITNESS:  Not deficiencies.  But, you know, comments about safety, security, ingress, egress, very typical.  In all of the projects that we have done, even when it's raw land, the state architect, we    we ask the state's architect to come and take a look at it and test it for its compatibility with the population to be served. And then after that initial green light, then to work with the specific state agency, in this case the Department of Developmental Disabilities, to make sure that they are satisfied with the site.  And then depending upon the funding source, the other state agency we work with is the New Jersey Housing Mortgage Finance Agency, they have their own architect and they have their own team that takes a look at a site for underwriting purposes to determine the space.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  So the plans that have been submitted on this comply with all of the requirements of the state and   
THE WITNESS:  The -- yes.  The overall    the plans have been    preliminary plans have been submitted and they do comply.  So on the broad strokes in terms of safety, security, the sprinkler system, area of refuge, other kinds of considerations, on the broad strokes they do. 
The next step is to work more and fine tune the floor plan internally in terms of the distribution of the apartments and how those apartments are configured.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Okay.  And the construction is all going to blend.  It's not that it distinguishes it or sets it off or anything.  It's going to be kind of the same finishes and everything, is that your understanding? 
THE WITNESS:  Oh, we  build to    I believe we built to a very high fit and finish.
Certainly on the exterior there's not going to be any significant change whatsoever to the current space, but on the interiors, I know you know we build, you know, especially since we're, you know, we're responsible for this for the long term, we build with very durable finishes because we find that if we spend a little bit more on the front end in terms of the appliances, the flooring, the wall board, that it saves money in the long run.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  And you indicated there's similar projects that worked well, and you feel very comfortable with this project? 
THE WITNESS:  The, you know   
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  For here.
THE WITNESS:  Most of our    most of our projects, I would say this is what we look for are projects that are in the downtown, proximate or in the downtown, for all of the reasons that I mentioned earlier.  It just makes for a much more meaningful life and allows for people to flourish. 
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Okay.  That's great. 
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  I have a question.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Yes, sure.  Susan.
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  Tom, I have a question, I'm just looking at the    the second floor and I see that it's the two bedrooms and then one one bedroom.  Is that accurate? 
THE WITNESS:  Yes.  Mayor, I would only    it's    it's    it depicts a likely floor plan and we're still back and forth.  We're working with a couple of different service providers. And one of the considerations is, you know, what's the configuration that best suits both the individual tenants and then the ability of the service provider to be able to adequately serve folks in the space, so there's a dynamic going on right now and we're involved with Bruce in terms of what the layout will be. But it's going to be    it's going to be no more than eight units, no more than 15 bedrooms in a apartment residential setting. 
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  So, again, I think my question is because that 15 beds, necessarily if you have a two bedroom unit, how is that    is that    how is that actually rented to one individual with a disability or two individuals with the disability and then is it family    a family member and a member with a disability, because it would seem to me then there has to be some   
THE WITNESS:  Yeah.
MAYOR KNUDSEN:    so just walk me through that. 
THE WITNESS:  That's an unusual circumstance.  These would be individual    one of the requirements that we are working on right now is in terms of the transition with the state benefits is that individual tenants need to have their own leases.  If they're in a two bedroom or three bedroom, they need to have an individual lease because that signals to the state that there is independence, choice, the ability to have visitors, and so on, you know, to live a more    to live a life just like you or I would live.  So it requires an individual, that there be an individual lease.  And every bedroom would have an individual in it.  So not    no single individual could rent a two bedroom apartment, for example. 
So there'd be 15 bedrooms, 15 individuals. 
MS. McWILLIAMS:  But the two bedrooms would have a lease per bedroom essentially rather than the unit? 
THE WITNESS:  Essentially, yeah   
MS. McWILLIAMS:  Okay.
THE WITNESS:  Okay. Yes.  That is correct. And one of the things that we do and I think we've developed a good capability of doing is that we make roommate matches.  We have a lot of two bedrooms and we also have four bedroom group homes.  So what we're looking for is to match people with complimentary skills and capabilities.  So it's a very careful    and by    and I would add that in terms of tenant selection, we    there is an application process available for download from our website, an open application process.  It may even be available with the village as well, we'll often do that with municipalities.  Hard copy pickups are here at the village hall; and every individual is interviewed, their guardians, their parents, their siblings, not to be invasive, but to get a full picture of the individual and what their capabilities are, what their proclivities are. We also interview their current service provider.  Often that current service provider follows the individual into their living situation, as well.  And when I say, "follow," I mean continues supervised service.  They don't live with them necessarily.  No one lives there, but provides service to their new    they may have provided services to them while they were in their parents' home or living elsewhere.  Now they'll provide services here in Ridgewood.
All of that is looked at and we sift and    and go over and then begin to make the roommate matches.  Again, the goal is to make sure that we're    we have folks who live in our projects who can live safely, securely, and take full advantage of what that particular project has to offer and the community has to offer.  So it's a very, very careful and thorough examination.
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  Thank you. 
MR. SCHEIBNER:  I have a question.  Could you describe the legal relationship that your organization will have with the owner of the property? 
THE WITNESS:  Sure.  We would have kind of a master lease for the second floor.  And then we would have a contract with    and this is what's kind of in flux with the State of New Jersey, whether we have a contract with one individual service provider or if we have a relationship with one or more.  We're thinking one right now. But depending upon the dynamic in terms of how benefits are provided to individuals with developmental disabilities, there could be a mix of service providers supporting folks in    IN the project.  We don't think that's likely, but it is possible.  But that's actually more the routine for us.  We both have single service providers in group home settings and then we have multiple service providers in independent living apartments that we have throughout the community.  So either way it will work, but right now we're kind of driven by what the State of New Jersey and the State Department of Developmental Disabilities wants on behalf of its clients, if you will. 
MR. SCHEIBNER:  Do the service providers, what service specifically do they provide? 
THE WITNESS:  It could be transportation to their employment, it could be a job coach when they're at their employment.  Several of our tenants work at Moe's Southwest Grill.  The family that owns Moe's Southwest Grill is from Wyckoff.  They're    they hire folks with developmental disabilities as a    as a purposeful business act, so a job coach could follow folks there as an example provided by a service provider.  All of these service providers, by the way, have to be licensed by the State of New Jersey to do what they do.  So there's a relatively small group of folks who are permitted to do this work.  We have folks who work at Park Avenue BMW.  We have folks who work at the Kunisch family that owns the Allendale Bar and Grill and the Mahwah Bar and Grill hire our folks all the time.  So there's    in some cases they have a job coach, in some cases they have transportation to their job.  Folks go up to the Y in Wyckoff as part of a special program there, swimming and to the gym and sometimes the staff members, you know, follow them, goes with someone, accompanies them, kind of a buddy system.  So there's a whole range of services that folks provide. 
MR. SCHEIBNER:  Does this    does the legal relationship you have with the property owner, does it have contingencies for changes?  You know, is there    have you experienced in your previous projects situations where there were unanticipated issues that needed to be worked out in any way.
THE WITNESS:  Well, we'll have a lease, and that lease will have    probably be    it is a pretty thick document.  We have ground leases in place in some instances where we might have bought a property in partnership with a municipality or a property has been conveyed    a municipality has conveyed property to us to build on.  And you know we have reverters, we have deed restrictions which    and which means that, you know, we can't ten years from now change the use to a commercial use or change the use to a market rental.  And we're quite content and happy with those kinds of restrictions because we are affordable housing developers so we're not looking to change the use ten years from now.  So the village would be protected in terms of the affordability requirements, the tenants would be protected, the individual tenants would have one year leases typically is what we do.  So they're not locked into long term leases in case they don't like living there and want to relocate.  But our arrangement with Onyx would be over long term, a 30 year period.
MS. McWILLIAMS:  You'll have a 30 year agreement with    is that what you said?  I'm sorry.  
THE WITNESS:  Yes, right now we're talking about 30 year lease agreement which would correspond to the affordability requirements, I believe, that are generated by the Enclave project.  And I would also add that this is not an uncommon relationship for us.  We very often work with market rate developers that have an affordable obligation and    and fulfill their affordable obligation, you know, on another site.  I mentioned earlier we're going to be building 85 units in Fair Lawn at the corner of River and Maple.  That was a negotiation, the Borough of Fair Lawn and with Garden Homes which redeveloped the former Kodak site on Route 208.  And we were able to shift the affordable obligation to what's known as The Promenade development, a River and Maple site, and build housing, senior housing that Fair Lawn did not have but wanted.  And that was approved by the courts, approved by the special master.  And that project, we expect, to get under way this fall.  So that kind of    when we    one of the projects we built in Allendale, not to go on and on about it, was another negotiation with Garden Homes, where we shifted an obligation from the project known as the Whitney to what's known as Cress Commons.  Kind of a rundown site on Crescent Avenue in Allendale that we were able to purchase with money from Garden Homes through the borough's municipal housing trust fund and then some of our own equity and redevelop the site to the delight of the neighbors, that was pretty rundown and had some environmental remediation requirements.
And we built a beautiful, affordable housing project that's rental and also home ownership also for special needs as well, which was a bit of a breakthrough at the time.
MR. MARTIN:  The Fair Lawn project that you just described, that 85 units were all for the United Way? 
THE WITNESS:  It's a    yes, it's affordable housing, it's going to be 85 units of senior housing, not all, and 85 units will be senior, 11 of those units are going to serve special needs individuals, that's an in fill, still affordable, so it's going to have both the special needs component, including some veterans' housing which qualifies as special needs, and then    so 11 from 85 is 74, 74 senior units and then 11 special needs units, so 85.  And there's a superintendent apartment in there somewhere, I'm not    so it might knock that down to 73 senior houses.
MR. MARTIN:  Would you anticipate that the Enclave would be    part of the population could be Veterans? 
THE WITNESS:  It's possible.  I'm not going to rule it out.  It really depends upon how the applicant pool develops.  It could    it could be possible, yes.
MR. MARTIN:  The only reason I ask is the board attorney in Emerson asked about Bergen County related so   
THE WITNESS:  The housing authority.
MR. MARTIN:  Veterans housing, yes, was that part of or a different   
THE WITNESS:  That's a different organization, yes.  But we    we did do a four bedroom group home in Emerson.
MR. MARTIN:  Yes. 
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  Tom, so I understand, the Fair Lawn location Garden Homes, that's the name of that one? 
THE WITNESS:  It's the Promenade site right on Route 208, there's a Starbucks.
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  So all their    so what you're saying all of their affordable housing that was required to be included for that particular property has been shifted to another location so there's' no affordable on site and all the affordable is off site and is either special needs or   
THE WITNESS:  Or senior.
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  I'm sorry? 
THE WITNESS:  Or senior.   
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  Or senior.
THE WITNESS:  Correct.
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  So the idea, I mean I just    you know, I know this is not relevant necessarily to what we're discussing, but, you know, the challenge is that the concept behind affordable housing is that there are also families who can't afford housing.
THE WITNESS:  Right. 
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  And so the shifting of all that housing certainly, I'm surprised that that    that all gets green lighted because it seems to undermine what the true effort is.
THE WITNESS:  Yes, I don't disagree, Mayor.  This was done about five years ago. It's taken that long for this project to wind its way to fruition.  And at that time Fair Lawn's quota of family rental units was considered to be pretty, you know     pretty good.  What they were lacking was senior housing. 
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  Right.
THE WITNESS:  So in the    in the overall design or architecture of Fair Lawn's affordable housing situation, senior housing was viewed as being a    being a deficit, not family rental.  So that conversion was easier to do    easy to do in terms of, you know, trying to satisfy    best satisfy the affordable housing obligation.  And then the inclusion of the special needs housing was something that an incentive was provided as a condition of the construction financing to do    to do that and the borough    and the borough embraced it.
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  Just striking a balance, I guess.
THE WITNESS:  Yes.
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  All right.  Thank you.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Chris, did you have any questions? 
MR. RUTISHAUSER:  No, thank you.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Beth? 
MS. McMANUS:  Just a couple questions.  I want to put a finer point on some of the affordable housing issues that were discussed this evening, just to make sure I'm clear and it's also clear for the record.  MR. TORONTO, I think I heard you talk about a 30 year affordability control will be applied to the property, you mentioned a 30 year lease, but will the affordability control be in the form of deed restriction to the property, is that    is that the proposal, or are you seeking another form of affordability controls? 
THE WITNESS:  I wasn't thinking of a deed restriction because we're not going to own the property.  I was thinking of a lease that the lease agreement would control.  And then whatever resolution or stipulation that might come from this proceeding, which will also govern, you know, the behavior of the property going forward.
MS. McMANUS:  Will you also receive, you mentioned HFMA funding and potentially other funding sources.  I'm not sure if you're    exactly what funding you're going to be seeking, if that would be applicable?
THE WITNESS:  Yes.  We're not    I am not suggesting that we're necessarily going to seek HFMA funding. 
MS. McMANUS:  What we're talking about is a retrofit of an existing space and I think that we can do that.  We've, you know, certainly had conversations with the borough    with the village, excuse me, in terms of their support for the municipality housing trust fund.  But I'm not anticipating that we would necessarily pursue HFMA, which by the why, at least currently the cupboard's a bit bare there. 
MS. McMANUS:  Say that again? 
THE WITNESS:  They don't have money that they're not underwriting, like, you know, projects like they once did currently. 
MS. McMANUS:  Okay.
THE WITNESS:  They've reached a volume cap in terms of some of the funding.  And we weren't anticipating using the home program either because of the nature of this site and in terms of its retrofit, it's not eligible for some other kinds of subsidies. But, you know, we have a commitment from the owner to help with the retrofit, which we think is going to be pretty efficient.  There's, for example, an existing sprinkler system, an existing elevator shaft, it has to be expanded, but there's some other characteristics of the building that lend itself to a low cost relative to stick built retrofit.
MS. McMANUS:  Are you comfortable sharing the lease with the board or board professionals because my concern for the board's information is that there is a lot of effort going through to make sure there's affordable housing incorporated into this project, obviously such that the village can receive affordable housing credits. And what I want to make sure is that we're going to get the full credit that the village deserves because the units will, in fact, be reserved for affordable households.  I want to make sure there's documentation that will support    ultimately support if you're comfortable sharing that lease that would, I presume, reference it being contingent upon providing affordable housing, that's something that I    I would like    while I'm open to other forms of documentation that might be a substitute for affordability control.  If there's something in the lease it could serve as the primary document. 
THE WITNESS:  Yes.  And my memory of the lease is that actually it is a benchmark, so to speak, to these proceedings insofar as our responsibility to comply and conduct into the future this space as affordable housing in support of the village's requirements of developers    Enclave developer requirement, so on, so forth. I have no issue at all with sharing the lease and making sure that it have the kinds of control that the village seeks.  MS. McMANUS:  Is that available between now and the next meeting so that I can take a look? 
THE WITNESS:  I think a draft of it could be made available.  We're still    we're still, you know, fine tuning it based on, as I mentioned earlier, the state's requirement.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Just so the record is clear that    I can't speak to the availability of a lease and when it might    when you might be able to look at it, if at all, frankly.  But I understand your concern and we certainly would cooperate not only with United Way, but with the village.  Look, the approval that we're seeking is clearly dependent upon the zoning, and it's clearly dependent upon the requirements of the ordinance.  And in terms of affordability and in terms of the number of units, et cetera, and the obligation to make certain that you get the credit on your overall    on the Village's overall housing obligation, affordable housing obligation.  We understand and its relationship, so making certain that there is sufficient documentation to support those conclusions and those objectives is absolutely fine. 
I just can't say at this time whether or not the property owner is prepared to make the lease a public document.
MS. McMANUS:  I can understand why that's a sensitive document.  I expect that portions of it would be    if you can shared.  I would expect portions of it would be redacted.  But I think you understand my concerns.  I think there's a    I think everybody is on the same page and operating in good faith, trying to create affordable housing that the village will get credit for.  I just have the added responsibility of making sure that the court sees it the way that we all see it, which is these units are going to be affordable for the next 30 years.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  My relationship   
MR. MARTIN:  I'm actually    on this end the language required for the ordinance, the statute, the state requirements and the lease language on what affordability controls, I puts that in the resolution, in terms of the financial aspect. 
MR. BRUINOOGE:  It's irrelevant.
MR. MARTIN:  I don't think it's relevant.  And as long as it's considered affordable housing.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Yes, I    let's just make it clear on the record that we fully understand and appreciate Mrs. McManus's concern.  My relationship years ago with Ronald Reagan got me always to the point where we trust, but we verify.  And I understand you're saying we trust what you're purporting to do, but we want to verify. 
MS. McMANUS:  That's exactly it.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Yes, so I get it. 
MS. McMANUS:  One more question.  I think I heard you say that there will be not more than 15 bedrooms of special needs housing    
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Correct.
MS. McMANUS:     but I want to find out if there's a minimum that you're    that you commit to as well or is it    is it really 15 bedrooms.
THE WITNESS:  That's been our operating    that's been our operating principal   
MS. McMANUS:  Okay.
THE WITNESS:    is 15 bedrooms.
MS. McMANUS:  Thank you.  I just wanted clarification on that. 
MS. McWILLIAMS:  Does the credit apply then, is it per bedroom?  Is it per unit?  The    I don't know if that's a valid question at this point. 
MS. McMANUS:  The unit credit for the bedrooms in the units and they must be built.  They must be occupied.
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  Well, I just had another question.  You know something you said earlier and that kind of brought us full circle and I think of the 30 year lease and we're talking about credits and taking care of the affordable component, but then there's people that we're talking about and it's very vulnerable members of our society.  And in 30 years, and I'm sure you know this, with certain disabilities, any level of change is dramatic and traumatic and difficult. And when you're talking about parents who are    what will happen to their children when they are gone, well    and I happen to know since I have a 15 year old that has a fairly significant disability, developmental disability.  So if I look down the road 30 years from now, you know, he could be 50 years old, what happens to that vulnerable part of our population when suddenly this 30 year lease expires and now there's no more affordable housing for disabled and then it    because that then put into the general stock, so what happens to them? 
THE WITNESS:  Well, Mayor, it doesn't necessarily stop being affordable at the end of 30 years.  And, in fact, I'll take    I believe there's an option, a renewal option in the lease.
But, typically, due to the    I guess it's the law of perpetuities, you can't say forever.  I think we've gone as far as 40 years, but typically 30 years is sort of the integer that's used for affordability purposes.  So certainly the projects that we built and own, it's not our intention, hopefully    it might be my decision 30 years from now, but I somehow doubt that, but it's not the organization's intention to convert them after    the affordability runs out. 
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  No, I understand that.
THE WITNESS:  After the affordability runs out.  In this particular instance I think that there is, you know, there will be enough time as the end of the lease approaches to deal with that question in terms of the affordability. One of the things that happens in individual municipalities and one of the reasons the municipal housing trust funds exist is that there are maintenance of existing condominiums or rental apartments on a scatter site basis that count towards the affordability index for a particular town.  So that's something that, you know, would probably, I would say, likely occur as the end of this term, this 30 year term approaches. 
But it's certainly a question we can talk over with our colleagues about.
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  Appreciate it.  Thank you.
MS. McWILLIAMS:  Is there    and they're one year leases, so, I mean, it seems unlikely that they're thinking 30 years down the road if the leases really operate in one year.
THE WITNESS:  Well, no the leases    I may have misspoke.  The overall master leases is for the    for the space.
MS. McWILLIAMS:  Understood. 
THE WITNESS:  But the    the individual tenants who would live there would need to have one year leases, it's really as a protection for them, so that they're not locked into a long term lease in case they decide they don't want to live there anymore, again, speaking to their independence and their freedom and flexibility.
In those leases though is a renewal, if you    I don't want to say an automatic renewal, but a renewal function to come back to us if they want to stay, because what parents want and what the individual wants is stability over the long term. But the state does not want people to be locked into long term living arrangements.
MS. McWILLIAMS:  Okay.  That's what you said.  Thank you.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  You're done? 
Next will be questions from the public.  Does anyone from the public have questions? 
(No response.)
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Seeing none, I guess you're done, MR. TORONTO.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Thank you.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Next witness, or do you need a break? 
MR. BRUINOOGE:  I'd appropriate a short break and I think the reporter might as well.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Okay.  Sure.  We'll take a five minute break.
(Whereupon, a brief recess is taken.)  
(Whereupon, Site Plan, 5/16/17, Revised 7/18/17 is received and marked as Exhibit AR 7 for identification.)
(Whereupon, Elevations N. Maple Avenue
5/02/17, Revised 7/18/17 is received and marked as Exhibit AR 8 for identification.)
(Whereupon, Blow Up of Elevation of Site is received and marked as Exhibit AR 9 for identification.)
(Whereupon, Minno Wasko Ground  Floor is received and marked as Exhibit AR 10A for identification.) 
(Whereupon, Minno Wasko First Floor is received and marked as Exhibit AR 10B for identification.)
(Whereupon, Minno Wasko Second Floor is  received and marked as Exhibit AR 10C for identification.)    
(Whereupon, Minno Wasko Third Floor plan is received and marked as Exhibit AR 10D for identification.)
(Whereupon, Minno Wasko Fourth Floor is received and marked as Exhibit AR 10E for identification.)
(Whereupon, Minno Wasko Roof Plan is received and marked as Exhibit AR 10F for identification.)
(Whereupon, Minno Wasko Signage  Elevation with Detail for Garage is received  and marked as Exhibit for AR 10G identification.)
(Whereupon, Minno Wasko Elevations are received and marked as Exhibit AR 10H for identification.)
(Whereupon, Minno Wasko Building Section is received and marked as Exhibit AR 10I for identification.)
(Whereupon, Minno Wasko Typical Unit Plan is received and marked as Exhibit AR 10J for identification.)
(Whereupon, Minno Wasko Building Area Diagram Minno is received and marked as Exhibit AR 10K for identification.)
(Whereupon, Minno Wasko Building Height  Diagram is received and marked as Exhibit AR 10L for identification.)
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  We'll go back on the record. 
Michael, can you call the roll? 
MR. CAFARELLI:  MAYOR KNUDSEN?
MAYOR KNUDSEN:  Here. 
MR. CAFARELLI:  COUNCILMAN VOIGT? 
COUNCILMAN VOIGT:  Here. 
MR. CAFARELLI:  Mr. Joel? 
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Here. 
MR. CAFARELLI:  MR. SCHEIBNER. 
MR. SCHEIBNER:  Here.
MR. CAFARELLI:  Mr. Torielli? 
VICE CHAIRMAN TORIELLI:  Here. 
MR. CAFARELLI:  MS. McWILLIAMS?
MS. McWILLIAMS:  Here. 
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Thanks, Michael.
MR. BRUINOOGE? 
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Thank you, Mr. Joel. 
Yeah, on behalf of our client we're calling from Minno and Wasko, Mr. Bruce Englebaugh, who's here this evening.  
MR. MARTIN:  Sir, can you stand up.  Raise your right hand.
Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God?    
MR. ENGLEBAUGH:  I do.
B R U C E    E N G E L B A U G H, Having been duly, testifies as follows:
MR. MARTIN:  And you're a professional architect.
MR. ENGLEBAUGH: Yes.
MR. MARTIN:  Licensed in New Jersey? 
MR. ENGLEBAUGH:  Yes.
MR. MARTIN:  You've testified before numerous planning boards in the State of New Jersey? 
MR. ENGLEBAUGH:  Yes, I have.
MR. MARTIN:  And you're still accepted as an expert here? 
MR. ENGLEBAUGH:  Thank you.
DIRECT EXAMINATION
BY MR. BRUINOOGE: 
Q. Bruce, you're the architect for the project that's currently known at least here in Ridgewood as the Enclave, and at the request of our mutual client, 257 RA, it's managing member John Saraceno, Minno and Wasko, under your direction, has prepared architectural plans for the project.  Is that so?
A. That is correct, yes.
Q. And those plans were submitted to the board or to the village some number of months ago and revised most recently and re filed and re presented to the board.  Is that correct?
A. Yes, that's correct.
Q. You appear here this evening with a number of exhibits, you've heard some of the back and forth between myself and MR. MARTIN earlier this evening. 
In the last month, in hoping that we could have save everybody time, we went ahead and marked, premarked a bunch of exhibits. 
MR. BRUINOOGE:  What we've done, so the record is clear, MR. MARTIN, is that MR. ENGLEBAUGH has brought entirely new    not    excuse me.  He has brought fresh boards, fresh exhibits which interestingly enough, follow and in numbering follow the original premarked exhibits, but we're marking them AR.  And so for the architectural exhibits starting with AR 6 all the way down through AR 10, and then there's a subset of AR 10, A through L, that will be the subject of tonight's testimony. 
MR. MARTIN:  AR 6 through AR 10A through L.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Correct.
MR. MARTIN:  And just bear with me, MR. BRUINOOGE, because sometimes the prehearing activities become more exciting than the hearing activities.  Since your witness did not testify previously, I did not mark any of the As much less the ARs, so let's    what are you going to call this one. 
MR. BRUINOOGE:  I'm going to call that AR, and that's going to be AR 6.
MR. MARTIN:  Great.  Go ahead, sir.
BY MR. BRUINOOGE: 
Q. Now, MR. ENGLEBAUGH, in addition to preparing the large scale exhibits that are copies of the plans submitted to the Village of Ridgewood, you also, at our request and for the convenience of the board, prepared some 11 by 17s? A. That is correct.  The drawings that were submitted earlier were black and white.  We've colorized them so it's easier for everybody to read them. Q. And the packet of colorized 11 by 17s that you've been kind enough to distribute to the board are copies of the plans that you're going to testify from and copies, therefore, of the plans that were submitted to the village as part of the application?
A. Correct.
Q. Okay.  Tell us about this project. 
A. Okay.  Let's begin at the top, I guess. The exhibit that you're looking at on the board now are some snapshots of downtown Ridgewood.  And back when we originally started this project you'll see the date on this exhibit is actually 2012.  So that's when we started working on this.  That's when those pictures were taken, and that's when we developed our initial concepts. 
And it's probably good if you looked at the ones on the right hand side because that embodies a lot of the architectural vocabulary that we tried to incorporate into the Enclave.  You'll see at the street level there, there are shops    I'm looking for my laser pointer, just a minute. 
So there are shops down here at this level, and you can see they all have some sort of horizontal band that separates that retail on the lower level from what I'll call the middle level (indicating).  These are divided horizontally somewhat with a base, a middle and a top. 
In the middle area you can see there's punched windows, and then at the top you can see there's a decorative entablature.  And when we get to the Enclave elevations you'll see that we've incorporated that as well.  The other thing to note in these is vertically you'll see these divisions (indicating).  Now, those occurred back in the day, I think, when the property lines kind of designated an individual owner's building.  He gave it his own identity.  So these always are broken into sub segments as you went along the street.  And you'll see once again when you get to the elevations of the Enclave that we tried to do that same thing.  If you drill in a little bit tighter you can see again there's punched windows.  You can see there's balconies.  Sometimes you have single windows, sometimes you have double windows.  Sometimes there's a straight window head, sometimes there's a curved window head, and on and on and on, with all those little details that give each one its individuality and its character.  So keep this in mind, I guess, as we go through the presentation.  Like I said, when we originally tried to do this we wanted to do a design that would fit nicely within the architectural fabric of Ridgewood.  We also wanted to, from a more functional standpoint, we wanted to fulfill a need by providing market rate rental housing.  We also wanted to provide another need which would have been special needs, because that's an underserved segment of society.  And we wanted to, being architects, we wanted to make a nice building that we're proud of, and hopefully, you know, fits nicely in Ridgewood and you're all proud of and it serves the applicant well in the whole process. 
So let's move on to the next exhibit, which would be the site plan. 
Q. That's been marked, has it not, Bruce?
A. This has been marked AR 7.
Q. Thank you. 
A. And it's labeled, "Site plan," and it has the revision date of 8/02/2017.  I think most of you are familiar with this, but let's just run through a little review of it. 
The Sealfons' building, which is the green building (indicating), is on the left, and the top floor, which is the second floor, that's where we're going to be putting in the special needs units.
So the whole building isn't getting renovated, it's just the top floor for the special needs unit.  And then over in the corner, you don't see it on this plan, but there's an elevator, and we're going to enlarge that elevator, as MR. TORONTO said, so it can accommodate a gurney. 
Over on the right hand side you'll see a tan building.  This is the new proposed Enclave building.  And you can see there's 39 dwelling units in there, it's labeled on the roof there (indicating).  This building gets a little more complex, I'll try to explain it as best I can.  In general, it's five levels, and it's basically four levels over parking, but when you get to the first floor it's a mix of parking and residential.  We'll see that when we get into the floor plans. Let's just look a little bit, first off, to get oriented, this is Ridgewood on the left, this is North Maple going along the bottom here, and then Franklin Avenue goes vertically up on the right hand side here (indicating).  So if you were to come into this building as a resident you would drive in either    well, if you're coming into the ground level actually, which is the lowest level, you would come in off of North Maple Avenue right here (indicating).  That's the ingress into the garage.  And you would ramp down about 2.5 feet, and that would take you to the lower parking level, which is at the same level as the Sealfons' parking lot, which is under the Sealfons' building.  I think you're familiar with that. 
We also have the front entrance right in the middle of the building here (indicating).  And to get to that entrance you could either go down a ramp for barrier free service right here or there's steps on the other side (indicating).  Again, that takes you down about 2.5 feet to the ground floor level.  To get to the first floor, that's the next level above the ground floor, you would drive up the ramp off of Franklin Avenue, that's this little parking area here (indicating).  So it's going to ramp up.  And then it takes you to a surface parking level that is above the parking garage that we just talked about.  And you'll see this as you drive up this ramp you drive under the building, okay.  So when we get to this, the first floor plan, you'll see that there's space under the building here for cars to park and for circulation to occur.  And there's also a main entrance under there, too.  Again you can't see it on this plan.  You'll see it when we get to the first floor.  One more thing to notice on this plan is the roof terrace.  It's facing out towards North Maple Avenue.  What we've done is we've taken that story off the top so that the facade that faces out onto North Maple Avenue is a whole floor lower.  It's going to make the building appear much lower and it actually provides a great amenity for the residents for the whole roof deck.  It's rare that we have a roof terrace this large on a project. Just for some statistics, if you look down to the right hand corner I think we know these by now, but you can see there's 39 units in the Enclave and there's eight units in the special needs where the Sealfons' building is.  And then we also have parking breakdown there.  The total parking is 131 spaces.  So let's move on to the next elevation    the next exhibit, which will be the elevation, and that's going to be the North Maple Avenue elevation where my laser is pointing right now (indicating) looking at the building here.  So this would be Exhibit AR 8.  Its title is, "Elevations," and the drawing title is actually, "East Elevation," which would be again the North Maple Avenue elevation.  If you look on the left side you will see that's the Sealfons' building, and on the right hand side is the new Enclave building (indicating).  The reason I put this exhibit up here is so you can see the big picture, so you can see the whole elevation that would face onto North Maple Avenue. 

The next exhibit I have is zoomed in to the Enclave portion of the building so we can see more of the detail, so let's move on to that.  Okay.  This is Exhibit AR 9.  It's also labeled, "Elevations."  It has a revision date of 8/02/2017.  Like I was saying, this is a close up of the Enclave portion of the building.  That main entrance that we were talking about is right here from the center (indicating), and that garage entrance is off to the left hand side right here where my laser pointer is (indicating).
BY MR. BRUINOOGE: 
Q. Bruce, I'm going to interrupt you just for a second, in looking particularly at AR 9, I see, at least to my eyes, three areas that have sort of a, I'll call it a red cloud.  What's that all about?  Why are these areas on AR 9 been marked off with this red clouded area?
A. Okay.  You're going to see the red cloud as we go through the presentation. 
The red cloud, I would say 90 percent of them are in response to the Beth McManus' memo.  The other 10 percent of those are improvements that we've made on our own because we felt it made a better functioning building.  So let's look at the overall elevation here. You'll see, I'm kind of echoing back to the vocabulary of the photographs of downtown Ridgewood.  You'll see that this has a base along the bottom, it has a nice, strong horizontal line that separates what I'll call the middle of the building these are those punched windows that we talked about earlier on the Ridgewood photos, the downtown Ridgewood photos. Then you'll see up on top it has an entablature.  And then the other component of this is the vertical, what I'll call segmentation where you try to divide    even though this is one long building, we subdivided the facade into different areas so each one has its own individuality and personality somewhat similar to the way Ridgewood Avenue is in downtown Ridgewood.  Looking into more of the detail, there's balconies, there's some bay windows, box bay windows.  Sometimes we have double windows, sometimes we have single windows and there's triple windows. So, again, we're using that variety to give each one of these segments its own character and individuality. You might look up at the entablatures, you'll see behind that, and that's the fourth story from the background, it's lighter.  And that is actually about 30 to 32 feet behind what I'll call the face of the North Maple Avenue elevation, so it sits back there pretty far.  And when we get to the building section you'll see it's not visible from the sidewalk level.  Materials, we're looking to use primarily brick veneer on all of this frontage.  The bay windows have a finish of cementitious board and then a product called AZEK, which is kind of a synthetic product that looks like wood.  The reason we like to use that is it's very durable and doesn't rot.  A couple other things while we're on this elevation, you'll see down in the lower right hand corner, those dark gray areas, those represent grills that go into the parking deck.  You'll see some of them on the right side and some of them on the left side as well.  If you go right into the center of the drawing, again, that's that main entrance, but you'll see there's windows that flank either side of the door, and we actually have some amenity spaces down there.  There's a fitness room on the left side and then there's a club room on the right hand side.  And, again, you'll see those when we get to those plans.  So speaking of the floor plans, let's    actually let me address these red clouds here (indicating).  You'll see the one red cloud where there's a mansard roof, there used to be a box bay window here (indicating) and that interrupted the    that roof line, so we've gotten rid of that box bay window so that this could be nice continuous and carry through the integrity of that roof design. Then down where it says "precast accent" towards the lower right hand corner, you'll see another red cloud (indicating).  That used to be tan colored brick and we changed that to precast so we did    that actually was in response to the planner's memo.  And that puts a base on the building.  I think everybody thinks that that's an improvement, so...  So I'd like to move on to the floor plan.  Okay.  This is a    going to be a flip chart and this is labeled AR 10.  And I think that AR 10 has sub-classifications, I think A through L, I believe.
MR. MARTIN:  I guess A would be the ground floor plan. 
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Correct.
THE WITNESS:  A is the ground floor plan, correct.  It's labeled as sheet A 1, and it has a revision date of 8/02/2017.  Again, just to get you oriented, it has the same orientation as the site plan we were just looking at.  North Maple Avenue goes along the bottom and Franklin Avenue is up on the right hand side (indicating).  Now, again, this is what I call the ground level plan.  It's basically, you can almost refer to it as a basement because it's really below grade.  The colored in portion here represents the parking garage that's underneath the Enclave building.  You'll see a line right where my laser pointer is now.  Everything to the left of that, that would be the garage area that's under the Sealfons' building.  So let's go back over to the colored area.  You'll see in the middle of that there is a    the front door, and the corridor, that takes you through all the way out to the garage in the back.  Those pink spaces on the left side, you'll see the fitness room, and on the right side there's a club room (indicating).  In the back there's some    two toilet rooms and two elevators, one for the passenger elevator and the other's a service elevator.  We have some red clouds, you'll see the red clouds here on the right hand side in the garage.  That's where we added the turnaround space.  And then if you go over near the barrier free spaces you'll see another cloud, and that's where we moved that previous parking space to gain that turnaround space.  You'll see some red clouds over on the right where the statistics are, and all we did was adjust the bedroom next on the special needs unit.  There used to be four one bedrooms and four two bedrooms and now, as you can see, it's one one bedroom and seven two bedrooms. Let's look over to the next one, which is the first floor plan, which is Exhibit AR 10B.  The date on it is 5/2, 2017.  So if we look over on Franklin Avenue, this is the driveway that I said was an incline, so you drive up this to get to the upper level.  And here's the front door in the building on the    from first floor level right here (indicating).  It's hard to see it, but this dotted line where my laser pointer is going around (indicating), that's the outline of the building up above.  If you remember, this is sort of an L shaped inverted or a backward L shaped.  Let me put the site plan up so you could see it.  So this is that backward L shape on the site plan down below (indicating) I don't know if everybody can see that or not.  That is this right here (indicating).  So this portion that you're driving under is this portion right here (indicating).  Okay? One of the items in the planner's memo has to do with this perimeter (indicating), which again is hard to see.  And I think the comment said that wherever there's a portion of the building that structural wall needed to come down to conceal the parking.  We're not going to be able to do that on this.  As you can see, it will very much encumber the parking circulation that's in here, and my opinion as an architect, I would like to have as much air and as much light in that space as possible because you're under a parking deck and if you put walls up it's going to get dark in there.  I think it should remain light.  It should    people should be able to see because there's cars driving through there.  But this is something that was outlined on the    from Beth McManus' memo that we just discussed.
BY MR. BRUINOOGE:   
Q. Bruce, on this particular Exhibit AR 10B, the area that you were just describing and referencing, the parking sort of in that area that you conscribed with your laser pointer  
A. Right here (indicating).
Q. Yeah, right in the middle there, that lies under the building above?
A. That is correct.
Q.  All right.  So the parking is at this level and the building above    there you go.  The building above, you know, provides the cover, if you will, for that particular area which is now marked in red and hatched as well.
A. Yes.  That is this (indicating).
Q. Okay. 
A. So you would drive underneath that.  And it's nice because it gives a nice coverage to that front door.  So in any inclement weather, it's dry, you're covered. Q. So people parking on that level, residents of The Enclave, the market rate units above, will be able to access the elevator bank and I guess the lobby on that level in a protected way?
A. That is correct, yes.
Q. Thank you.
A. The design of this, again, this is the residential units down here in the tan color (indicating).  This is what we call a double loaded corridor, meaning we have units on each side of the corridor.  You'll see these two bedroom dens face out onto North Maple Avenue, and then we have these other three units in the back that face out towards the parking lot. Where the elevators are, right behind that you can see there's a service area.  And right to the right hand side of that is a trash room.  So there would be a trash chute in the building.  All the trash would come down to this room and then it would go out these double doors to this dark gray colored area up in the upper left hand corner, and that's what we're going to call a trash transfer station.  So the trash would be transported by porter out of the trash room over to the trash transfer station and then there's a chute where it goes down to the level below and then that's where the trash truck can pick up all the trash.  Let's move on to the next level.  This would be the second floor plan, Exhibit AR 10E.  Sheet number   
Q. C?
A.    A3.
Q. Is it AR 10C? 
A. Yes. 
Q. I don't think so.  AR 10, it should be C. 
A. You're right, I'm sorry.  C. 
So this is, the sheet number is A 3, and the date is 8/02/2017, is the revision date. 
The only thing that changed on this from the last one is over on the left hand side.  This is the arrangement of the floor plan layout for the special needs units on the Sealfons' side of the building.  You can see there are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven two bedrooms, and then on the light tan color is the one bedroom, and then in the light green color is a community space (indicating). From talking with Tom Toronto I understand there's going to be, like, a kitchenette in here, a living room.  This is where the    any of the staff members would probably be.  There is no office, but there might be a    they might have a little work station in the kitchen or something like that. Over in the right hand side is The Enclave portion of the building.  You can see the two elevators in gray is the trash room that we just spoke about, and at each end of the hallway there is a fire stair (indicating).  Q. Just so it's clear, the special needs in the    that would    would exist in the existing Sealfons' building is not directly assessed or accessible to or from the proposed Enclave market rate units.  Is that correct? A. That is correct.  Part of that reason is the floors don't align.  Let's move on to the third floor.  This is Exhibit AR 10D, as in Delta.  The date is 5/2, 2017.  The sheet number is A 4, and it's the third floor.  This is very similar to the second level we looked at.  It's a double loaded corridor, has units on each side, the stairways at each end, elevators in the middle here and the trash room.  Like I said, basically the same as the second floor is stacked (indicating).  Let's move on to the fourth floor.  This is Exhibit AR 10E, sheet number A 5, fourth floor.  Revision date of 8/02/2017.  The things that have changed on this when you compare it to the floor below is here's where you see the roof deck that's facing out onto North Maple Avenue, and then behind that is, like, a single loaded corridor because we just have units on the one side, and then the vertical length is a double loaded corridor.  You'll see a red cloud on this, what's called the amenity space, that's kind of a pink color (indicating).  And that is the new room that we added that came up in Beth McManus' memo where we needed some more amenity space, so we've added this space in here (indicating), and it gives us a good overage of what the requirement is.  So let's move on to the next sheet.  This is exhibit AR 10F, sheet number A 6.  It's the roof plan, and it has a revision date of 8/02/2017. The thing to take note of on the roof plan, I think, is the mechanical equipment.  You'll see a red cloud, if you look down in the lower right hand corner, there's a typical rooftop unit detail, and there's a red cloud on this louver system and what that does is it's going to screen the units so if anybody who ever saw these up on the roof, they would be screened by this louver system.  And that louver system would go around all of the areas where there are condensing units.  And then there's another red cloud where we've added an amenity space over on the left side there (indicating).  Next exhibit.  This is AR 10G, sheet No. A 7 entitled, "Elevation," and a revision date of 8/02/2017.  Up on the very top is the North Maple Avenue elevation.  It's in black and white.  We've already talked about this so let's skip over that.  The lower elevation is the south elevation, and it's what you would see from Ridgewood Avenue.  You would see the Sealfons' building in the foreground and then way in the background you would see The Enclave building.  You would see this portion on the right hand side and that would be closest to you, that would be this (indicating) if you look on the site plan.  And then this leg of the building towards the left would be this leg back here (indicating).  You can see it's a good distance away from Ridgewood Avenue, this portion of the building.  There are some red clouds on here.  You'll see the amenity space for that is in the upper right area, there's a red dotted line and then a cloud around it that says amenity space (indicating).  And over on the right hand side you can see we added a signage detail and a garage screening detail.  Both of these were on Beth McManus' memo.  I think she's agreed with what we're showing and proposing now.  If you look back on the south elevation you'll see another red cloud at the top of that exterior stair.  That just represents that trash transfer station that we were talking about right here (indicating).  And that was changed to brick.  It was stucco before, now it's brick. 
The next exhibit is AR 10H, sheet No.  A 8.  It's labeled, "The Elevation," and it has a revision date of 8/02/2017.  If you look at the top elevation this is the west elevation.  The Sealfons' building is off on the right hand side and then the new on site portion is on the left hand side.  So we would be looking    we would be looking this way on this site plan (indicating).  So looking at the top you'll see some red clouds.  Over on the left hand side we have a brick area and that previously did not have any windows.  As a part of Beth's memo she recommended we put some windows in here, so that's what that red cloud refers to.  We've changed those blank walls into walls that now have some windows so it looks much nicer.  Over on the right hand side you'll see where it says amenity space.  There was no space here before.  There was no wall.  There was no room there.  We've added that room.  And, again, that amenity room.  Another red cloud down to the lower right, that's the trash transfer station, and we changed all that material to brick where it was stucco before (indicating).  Again, that was at the recommendation on Beth's memo, which we upgraded that finish material.  You can see as far as on the back we have brick, we have a mix of brick finish material and we have stucco material in here and then this is brick in here as well (indicating).  Moving down, this is the north elevation.  This is what would be facing Franklin Avenue.  If you look down in the lower right hand corner, this would be the ramp up, the drive ramp up right here (indicating).  That comes in off Franklin Avenue.  That's located right here.  So you would drive up that ramp and then drive under this building.  That's where you see these columns.  They're supporting the three stories up above (indicating).  I don't think we have any red clouds on this, but just a little bit about the elevation.  On the far left you'll see that's brick veneer.  Then we have the stucco portion as you move towards the right, in the center there's a brick veneer portion, it switches back to stucco and then to the far right we have a brick veneer again.  We're trying to mix those material to give it a little more interest and break the scale down.  Even though this sits back a good distance from Franklin Avenue up there, that's this facade right here that we're going to look at.  Let's move on to the next sheet.  This is AR 10I, sheet No. A 9.  And it's a building section, and its revised date is 8/02/2017.  This really helps to explain what the building looks like.  If you look at the far right you'll see North Maple Avenue, and then as you drive in off of North Maple Avenue this is the slope down into this garage area.  And the garbage area goes from the front of the building here all the way to the back.  If you go up above here, this is that surface park area that I was telling you about.  It serves the first floor of the building and the two dwelling units on that level, and the main entrance would be here as well (indicating).  Moving farther to the right here you can see that there's three dwelling units that are stacked over top of the garbage and then there's the terrace up on top.  And you'll see that dotted line, that sight line that goes down to a person standing on the opposite side of North Maple Avenue on the sidewalk there (indicating).  You can see where that sight line cuts off, so that wall that's in question as far as what material would be used at the setback, like I said, about 30 feet from the North Maple face of the building.  There's a red cloud up on top.  All that shows is the louvers that go around the mechanical equipment.  One thing to note and you'll see down in the lower left hand corner it's a subsurface utility room.  There's a basement there right now that's currently constructed, and we're going to put a ramp, a driveway into the garage to go over top of that basement area.  We're going to use as much of that basement as we can for incoming utilities, electrical, maybe water, things like that.  There's a lot of science and technicalities that's going to go in there.  We're going to have to go in and measure it to clearly understand the floor level and we're going to have to look at all the mechanical equipment that's coming in there, but we'd like to use as much as we can, if possible.  But, again, that's an existing basement.  It has a ceiling height probably about as high as this right now, about maybe 10 feet.  We're going to cut that down, I don't know the exact height, but it may be 7  or 8 feet high in here, maybe less on the back side.  Again, it's undetermined at this point.  We know in concept that it's going to work and we'll get some utilities down there.  The next sheet is Exhibit AR 10J.  These are typical unit plans.  Sheet No. A 10, revised date of 8/02/2017.  The only thing that we did different on these unit plans is these didn't match the building plans before.  They were too small and they've been increased in size so you see the one bedroom is 865 square feet, the two bedroom is 1,250 square feet.  And, again, these now match the building height where they didn't before.  This is one of those improvements that we did that wasn't on Beth's review memo.  The last sheet is    or actually the second to the last sheet, this is the building area. It's Exhibit AR 10K, and it has a revision date of 8/02/2017.  This exhibit just shows on each floor area starting in the lower right, we have the ground floor moving up, we have the first floor, then the second floor, and then towards the left we have the third and the fourth floor.  And, again, all this diagrammatically shows is the area for all these components of the building, and they're totally down in this little statistics chart.  You can see there's some red clouds here (indicating).  This is what Mike Dipple referenced earlier.  There were some changes in the square footage, and the reason they changed was because of this amenity area that we added on the fourth floor up here (indicating).  That added square footage to the building so it threw all of our other calculations off, but everything is still in that acceptable range.  The last exhibit we have here is the building height diagram, Exhibit No. AR 10L.  And it has a revised date of 8/02/2017.  And what this exhibit does is in the center is The Enclave building, and then on either side there are buildings that are nearby, and what they do is they relate their height to The Enclave building.  The code definition puts our height at 54 feet 11 inches, or 54.92 feet, and that represents, if you go to the top of that light gray, that's where that dimension is measured to.  And, again, that's established from an imaginary plane, the grade plane, that is calculated by figuring points around the building perimeter, and I think Mike Dipple did that with Beth McManus and I think we're all okay with that calculation now. Earlier, I think back in 2014 when we were presenting this earlier, many of the board members said we don't understand what the real height is.  We measure height just like anybody else would from the sidewalk.  So what we've done is we've taken different segments of the building facade and put heights on each one of those from the sidewalk.  And you can see how they can compare to the buildings next to it.  And most all cases we're at least as far as 263 Franklin Avenue and the Cottage Place building are concerned, we're below, well below those. So with that, I would wrap up my testimony and if anybody has any questions I would entertain them now.  Just going back to our original goal, I think we've done a nice looking building.  I think it fits well within Ridgewood.  I think it meets a housing need, and I think that it looks nice and it's something we can all be proud of.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  As long as you want to go, it's okay with me. 
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Yes.  We're going to carry cross examination to the next meeting, just we're running out of time.  And again, I guess it's scheduled for September 19th is the return date, so we'll ask questions at that time.  So everyone should review the exhibits that were provided.  And I guess it's carried without prejudice to the board.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  That's correct.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  And without further notice.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  That is correct.  And thank you for not to have to notice, but we certainly understand.  Thank you.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Okay. 
This matter is carried to September 19th, 2017, and we'll pick up with the architect, Bruce Englebaugh, at that time for cross examination by the Board. 
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Thank you very much.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Okay.  Thank you, MR. BRUINOOGE.  Good night.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Appreciate your time.
CHAIRMAN JOEL:  Thank you, MR. ENGLEBAUGH.
THE WITNESS:  Thank you.
MR. BRUINOOGE:  Good job, Bruce. 
(Whereupon, this matter will be continuing at a future date.  Time noted 10:34 p.m.) 

Adoption of Minutes: The minutes from September 6, 2016 and September 20, 2016 were adopted written.

The meeting was adjourned at 10:36 p.m.      

Michael Cafarelli
      Board Secretary

Date approved: October 16, 2018