CAPE MAY – A controversial plan to demolish and rebuild the ’50s style Jetty Motel, adjacent to Cape May’s Cove Beach, continues to run into problems with the city’s Planning Board.
In a Jan. 25 meeting of the board, a request for formal extension of site plan approvals, that are over 2 years old, was denied. The denial sets up what the Planning Board’s attorney, Richard King Jr., hinted may be a potential challenge to the board’s decision in Superior Court.
“I want to be sure we have a complete record if this goes to Superior Court,” he said.
Background
The new hotel project was initiated over a decade ago. It received its most recent preliminary and final site plan approvals in August 2019.
By March 2020, plans for a new Jetty Resort were introduced by the applicant, Cape Jetty LLC. They contained the addition of a public restaurant and other amenities that would not be limited to hotel guests.
Those plans required new approval by the Planning Board largely because the public use of the hotel’s amenities produced a parking requirement in excess of what had been approved in 2019. Parking is a ubiquitous problem in Cape May.
At a November 2021 meeting, the Planning Board denied the revised site plan approval, due largely to the fact that the plan did not meet the requirements for parking spaces, given the intended public use of the new hotel’s amenities.
A proposal by the applicant to meet the requirement, through valet parking and leasing spaces in a remote parking lot, was not specific enough to convince board members to vote for the altered plan.
As that November meeting ended, the applicant expressed several times an intention to move ahead with the exiting August 2019 approval and construct a larger resort hotel, with its amenities confined to use by hotel guests only.
What was not anticipated was the newest strategy by a group of neighbors opposed to the project. The “objectors,” as they are referred to in the board discussions, have raised the issue of whether the August 2019 approvals are still valid.
The attorney for Jetty Motel Inc. repeatedly maintained that the approvals remain in effect, arguing that his clients are seeking the extension only as a formal means of negating this most recent challenge to their validity.
Jan. 25 Meeting
The board’s vote at its Jan. 25 meeting did not rule on the existing validity of the 2019 approvals. What it did was deny an extension for those approvals, an extension that the applicant’s attorney maintained would have only had the effect of extending the protections against any zoning changes that could impact the project. Whether the city will issue permits for a project for which site plan approvals are over 2 years old remained unclear at the end of the meeting.
Throughout the over two-hour meeting, the board’s attorney repeatedly corralled the discussion to keep the issues strictly tied to the applicant’s request for an extension. Three separate votes were taken.
The first vote was on the applicant’s right to apply for an extension, given the lapse of over two years since the site plan approvals.
Here, the board was advised by its attorney that the strict limitations in the city ordinance, which would have denied the applicant the opportunity to request the extension, were superseded by the state’s Municipal Land Use Law, which he interpreted as explicitly allowing a developer to request an extension, even after the two-year period had lapsed. The final vote on this issue was 8-1 in favor of the applicant’s right to request the extension. The lone negative vote came from Deputy Mayor Stacy Sheehan.
The second vote was on the applicant’s specific request of a one-year extension, which, if granted, would have been backdated to begin at the end of the two-year period authorized in the 2019 approvals. It would have started in August 2021, leaving eight months remaining in the normal one-year extension period. This is the critical vote the applicant lost. No extension was granted.
Given the fact that the state’s Covid Extension Act of 2020 had offered a mechanism for extending approvals where the start of construction was interrupted by the pandemic, a third vote was taken by the Planning Board as to whether that statute extended the time for the Jetty Motel project separate and apart from any other consideration related to the requested extension.
The objectors’ attorney argued that the statute required a developer to file with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to receive benefit from the automatic extension that the statute offered.
The applicant presented no evidence as to whether the project had been filed with the DEP and the assumption expressed by some board members was that such a filing had not taken place, or at least the applicant had not shown them that it did. The vote to deny the applicant’s request for an extension under the Covid Extension Act was unanimous.
The meeting was then adjourned, with the future of a new resort at the site of the current Jetty Motel still unclear.
To contact Vince Conti, email vconti@cmcherald.com.
