Performance bonds a sensible proposal

Members of South Brunswick’s Planning Board appear to be taking a harder line these days on the warehouse development in the area east of the turnpike. Last week, the board discussed holding the would-be developer of a 1.4 million-square-foot warehouse complex to a performance bond that ensured it provided adequate stormwater management at the Davidsons Mill Road site. The idea, first proposed by board member Edmund Luciano, calls for an independent engineer to determine after five years if the system has worked, and then return the developer’s money if it has.

When you move into an apartment, it’s standard to give the landlord a deposit to back up your obligation to take good care of the place. If everything looks good when you drop off the key, you’ll get that money back, but if the place is in shambles, you can kiss that money goodbye. We think it’s reasonable to hold the developers to that same standard.

To be sure, there’s a difference of opinion on why, or even if, unnatural levels of flooding are occurring in Pigeon Swamp State Park, as residents near that area contend. Members of the Eastern Villages Association (EVA) contend stormwater from the warehouses has overburdened the drainage system, and blasts through an outfall pipe in the park at a rate the land can’t handle. On the other hand, Mayor Frank Gambatese is one of a group of township officials who doubt the severity of the flooding, and say that water is only naturally flowing from the uplands warehouse area to the low-lying terrain at Pigeon Swamp.

Perhaps it’s time for the Township Council or state Department of Environmental Protection to have a study done on the flooding issue. As it stands, we know of no quantifiable data that’s been gathered to support either argument, and neither Gambatese nor the EVA is a trained expert on the subject.

This latest warehouse will not be the last proposed in eastern South Brunswick. If the decisions being made might carry permanent environmental ramifications, it only makes sense that officials have the best data available to make them. But at least for now, it looks like the Planning Board is starting to ask the right questions.