Residents, Officials Continue to Question Trash Truck Parking Plan

After hitting statutory meeting time limits Tuesday night, the Barnegat Township Zoning Board again delayed a decision on a controversial application by a Route 72 landowner seeking to expand his gas station and body shop to include storage of a dozen garbage trucks and as many trash containers.

The board heard heated testimony in the three-and-a-half-hour meeting on the use variance application submitted by Andrew Pinto of South Plainfield, who wants to use his property at the intersection of County Route 554 and Route 72 to store trash trucks he uses in his waste management business.

The company handles garbage pickup for the Barnegat Township School District and several local municipalities.

Pinto’s attorney, John Cannella, called on a planning expert and an engineer to make the case that the land is uniquely suited for truck storage and deserves a variance excepting it from existing rules. They were met with repeated questioning by board members and protests by members of the public.

Neighbors said two things worry them the most about the storage of trucks on the site: smell and safety.

“This is not the border of Barnegat, but it’s the gateway to residential Barnegat,” said John J. Novak, an attorney representing a Pinto neighbor and himself a resident of East Bay Avenue. “Do you really want to live in a town where you say, ‘When you smell the garbage trucks, but your left blinker on?’”

Several residents said they’ve had near misses with Pinto’s trucks at the sharp intersection when the vehicles have been waiting to refuel. Brookville Road resident Ed Covitz said having them coming and going regularly from the site would be too dangerous.

“It’s a death trap,” he said.

Zoning board members and Novak focused on the testimony of Pinto’s experts, questioning project planner John Leoncavallo and engineer James F. Stanton’s assertions about the suitability and safety of the proposal.

“This is a good property for (Pinto),” Leoncavallo said. “It’s the only small developed piece west of the Parkway…in my mind, you really shouldn’t waste that.”

He also said that while Pinto has made major improvements to his property, a former junkyard, problems remain – problems that the board could eliminate by approving Pinto’s application and attaching the condition that he continue cleanup.

“If you do deny it, the property can stay the way it is,” Leoncavallo said.

Barnegat Township engineer John Hess pushed back, calling Leoncavallo out on what Hess interpreted as Pinto’s intention to do nothing to clean up environmental problems if his application is denied.

“If there’s an issue, it gets resolved regardless,” Hess said. “The bottom line is they have to demonstrate compliance with regulations.”

Stanton said the plan for the Pinto site takes traffic safety into account, and that garbage trucks pulling in and out of the property don’t pose a unique problem.

“I feel the intersection is basically safe, but it’s not as desirable as you might like,” said Stanton. 

“We all understand that heavy trucks have to pull out into traffic,” Novak replied during his cross-examination. “That’s the nature of trucking. But can you think of any other site on 72 that has such a sharp angle as this?”

Members of the public also raised concerns over the sensitivity of the Pine Barrens site. Despite the Pinto teams’ assurances that wastewater would be appropriately disposed of, some they worried about leaking liquids from trucks permeating the soils at the site.

“Environmentally, we just don’t want it,” said Marty Weber, a Barnegat Township Environmental Commission member whose property abuts Pinto’s. “He sits on top of our largest aquifer. It’s our drinking water.”

Over protests from Cannella, Pinto’s attorney, Pinelands Preservation Alliance representative Theresa Lettman presented maps she said show the property has an exceptionally high level of ecological integrity. According to her organization, she said, the land parcel would be negatively impacted by the expansion of Pinto’s business, and its quality means it has a lot to lose.

“I just want to show why it’s special, why it needs to be protected and why it needs to be looked at a little bit differently,” she said.

But Cannella said Lettman’s points were theoretical, not practical, and pointed out that the Department of Environmental Protection has inspected the site.

“Yes, we want to protect the Pinelands, but we have businesses here, we have investments,” he said. “If we have to control it, we will control it. But we’re not going to stifle it, and what you want to do is stifle every area of development in the Pinelands.”

Because required time constraints cut the meeting off before all members of the public could weigh in on the application, the zoning board voted to continue the hearing on the issue at its next regular meeting, currently scheduled for the second Tuesday in January.

Due to time constraints, the board also chose to delay hearing testimony in an application for a bulk variance requested by Glen Kelly, LLC, for a property at 319 Bayshore Drive.