Town centers for fort host towns envisioned

BY SUE MORGAN
Staff Writer

EATONTOWN - After four months of walking Fort Monmouth and endless hours of preparing maps, drawings and Power Point slides, 10 University of Pennsylvania graduate students hope their study of Fort Monmouth gets an "A."

A more spacious municipal building for Eatontown, along with variations on a landscaped town center for that borough and for neighboring Oceanport and Tinton Falls were among the suggestions in a preliminary redevelopment scheme for the closing base's 1,126 acres created and presented by the students to the Fort Monmouth Reuse Committee (FMRC) on Monday.

A slide presentation of the study entitled "A Changing of the Guard: A New Vision for Fort Monmouth" as presented by the students from the Philadelphia-based university's master's degree program in city planning highlighted the FMRC's last meeting before its disbandment.

The FMRC is soon to be supplanted by the state-sanctioned Fort Monmouth Economic Revitalization Authority once all appointees for that 10-member panel are named by the state and federal government.

The written report authored by the students will be forwarded to the new authority once it is organized, said FMRC Chairman and Eatontown Mayor Gerald J. Tarantolo.

Tarantolo, along with two other FMRC members, Oceanport Mayor Lucille Chaump and Tinton Falls Mayor Peter Maclearie, will serve as three of the nine voting members on the new authority.

With median monthly rents of $1,200 in the area around the fort and average household incomes at about $76,000 yearly, suitable housing is out of reach of those working in service professions such as teaching and law enforcement, said Mike Smart, one of the presenting students.

"Any redevelopment effort will have to focus on [providing] affordable housing," Smart said. "We encourage a mixed use [of housing] in neighborhoods."

Eatontown, Oceanport and Tinton Falls - the base's host communities - would see a variety of new apartments, townhomes or row houses and detached single-family houses and senior housing constructed if the plan were implemented, said Melinda Watts, another presenter.

However, open space in all three communities is "the single largest use" of the fort property, which has about 184 acres of wetlands, Watts said.

Institutional uses by Brookdale Community College or government agencies, such as the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, were also

incorporated, both Smart and Watts said.

"Brookdale has expressed interest in growing," Smart said.

Retail "power centers" similar to The Grove in Shrewsbury could also be constructed to complement the housing.

"There's great potential for retail," Smart said.

Having observed a high amount of vacant spaces in office buildings near the base, the students shied away from proposing more of that type of use.

"The office space market shows it is oversaturated," Smart said.

Health care facilities were also ruled out by the students as a possible use, he noted.

Altogether, about 905 acres of the base, mostly in its western portion, can be developed in some way, Smart said.

A 62-acre "Village Center" with 60 "courtyard homes." Thirty-eight rowhouses, and 79 detached senior housing units, and retail spaces could be constructed in the southernmost part of the post off Main Street in Oceanport, Watts explained.

A centralized "town square" in the center would feature green space for community gatherings, she added.

Eatontown's 72-acre "Civic Center" would front Route 35 and feature a "memorial sculpture park" at the installation's west gate across from Tinton Avenue, Watts said.

A building now used by the Army's Communications and Electronics Command (CECOM) and an adjacent theater could be transformed for municipal purposes, Watts noted.

Eatontown Borough is considering using about 50,000 square feet in the present-day CECOM building because its operations have outgrown the 16,000-square-foot, municipal building at 47 Broad St., Tarantolo said later.

"We're bursting at the seams," Tarantolo said. "We're totally out of space."

Eatontown would try to acquire the CECOM building via a public benefit conveyance (PBC) in which the federal government would turn over property at no cost to the borough, he explained.

In addition to the CECOM building and theater, Eatontown would also see 243 new apartments, 66 townhouses and new retail establishments under the university students' plan.

The Eatontown Civic Center "is not intended to detract from, but to add to" the redevelopment of the borough's historic Main Street district along Route 35, Watts stressed.

In Tinton Falls, a 52-acre Town Center could be constructed adjacent to the Garden State Parkway and Tinton Avenue near the new municipal building now under construction, Watts continued.

"That land has fewer environmental constraints and wetlands and the maximum development capacity," Watts said.

Depending on whether or not the proposed Middlesex-Ocean-Monmouth (MOM) rail line comes to fruition, the town center could be a "transit-oriented development," should a branch of the train track be fed through Tinton Falls, Watts said.

Office and retail space, as well as an entertainment center with an Imax theater, could be constructed on a centrally located civic plaza or square accessible by foot from nearby parking lots, she continued.

Apartments and townhouses would be constructed around the commercial area.

An existing day care center and fire station, now located in the Charles Wood area of Fort Monmouth, would be kept as part of the large town center, Watts said.

The university did not charge for the study which the students did for academic credit under the direction of Jim Kise, a professor in the university's city planning program, Tarantolo said.

"Professor Kise said that we were getting $50,000 worth of consulting for free," Tarantolo told the FMRC.

"It's a preview of what potentially might be at Fort Monmouth ten years down the road," he said.

Oceanport is now considering a proposal by the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority to construct a type of village or town center near Port-Au-Peck and Oceanport avenues, Chaump said.

The students might not have been made aware of that proposal, which calls for a mix of retail, office space and age-restricted housing, she noted.

Otherwise, Chaump praised the students' work.

"They did an excellent job," she said.

In concept, Maclearie said he appreciates the students' ideas for a town center for Tinton Falls.

However, rather than a square with retail built around it, Maclearie would prefer to see a tree-lined boulevard leading to and from the new borough hall.

The town square described by the students and shown in their renderings might be "too intense" for the area, Maclearie said.

"We want to preserve the character of the town," he said. "We want more of a village concept."

The large retail component might attract shoppers from outside of the square area in addition to those living in housing on the square, Maclearie said.

Tinton Falls might not be ready to deal with the influx of outside shoppers, he pointed out.

"I would expect some users will come from out of town," Maclearie said. "Overall, I prefer to see a less intense use."

Under the guidance of Fort Monmouth Garrison Commander Col. Ricki L. Sullivan, a nonvoting member of the FMRC, the students have been studying Fort Monmouth's buildings, land and infrastructure since January.

The base is slated to shut down as a cost-cutting measure under the Pentagon's Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process.