Mall Officials Seeking Changes to Parking Standard

The Millburn Township Committee introduced a change in the zoning ordinance that would allow the Mall at Short Hills to use more of its space for retail, but there were some concerns expressed about the measure.

The measure would change the parking requirements from 4.5 parking spaces for every 1,000 square feet of leasable area to 4.25 spaces. It's a proposal mall officials have brought forward and provided data from a study showing they only need four parking spaces per 1,000 square feet of leasable area.

Kenneth Leiby, Planning Board chairman, said mall officials are looking to develop an area of 50,000 square feet of space they wanted to convert several years ago. But mall officials withdrew that application because of the amount of parking that would be required to be added on to a parking deck and putting it out of service for a length of time.

Officials believe because the mall has little entertainment—there is no movie theater and there are few restaurants—it drives the need for parking down, he said. Right now, 2 percent of the space is used for entertainment, and mall officials project using up to 3 percent of the space for that use. Leiby said the ordinance also caps the amount of space to be used for entertainment at 10 percent before the parking requirement increases.

The risk also is minimal because reducing the parking needs on the site is an economic problem for the mall and not something that will affect neighbors, he said. "If there's no parking, people go home," he said. "They lose customers."

But Daniel Baer, a committee member, said he had concerns about what would happen if mall officials built a free-standing restaurant rather than one incorporated to the current mall building. A free-standing restaurant would generate more traffic and a greater need for parking.

He asked for the Planning Board to review the matter and incorporate language into the ordinance for free-standing restaurants. "I just want us to do this once and do it right," he said. "We just need to cover ourselves."

The ordinance needs to go back to the Planning Board before final Township Committee approval. If the board proposes significant changes to the ordinance, it would need to be re-introduced for a first reading by the Township Committee before it could be approved.