Ringwood allows big house on small lot

Wednesday, July 23, 2003
By JAN BARRY
STAFF WRITER

RINGWOOD - A home-building application this week showed how environmental protection laws can be bent to allow the latest trend of bigger homes on small mountainous lots.

That's the way it went Monday when the Board of Adjustment granted a zoning variance letting a developer bulldoze more than a third of a steep, wooded parcel in order to shoehorn a 3,400-square-foot house onto a one-acre lot.

A project engineer for Pulte Homes argued that is what is needed these days to put in a two-story house and garage, with a winding driveway and turnaround area large enough to play basketball, and a septic system big enough to handle wash loads and bathroom trips for mom and dad and three or more active kids.

To minimize mudslides and tainted runoff into brooks flowing to the nearby Wanaque Reservoir, the borough's zoning ordinance for the steep, rocky Stonetown section set a disturbance limit of 28 percent. To get approval to exceed that limit, a builder is required to demonstrate that the regulation creates a land-use hardship.

Tibor Latincsics, the project engineer, testified that a hardship was created in this case because the Board of Health insisted that a septic system be buried in the rocky slope large enough for a five-bedroom house, even if the building were designed with fewer bedrooms.

The health board's concern, he said, is that a den or finished basement could be turned into a bedroom. The number of bedrooms for this house has yet to be decided.

A septic system for a family of five, he said, takes up more than half of the allowable disturbance area. With an existing house and well near the property line, Latincsics said, it makes sense to site the new house further up the slope. And that requires a longer driveway, with more land disturbance.

Borough Engineer Edward Haack said he agreed with Latincsics' logic.

"The layout they have submitted is a good plan for the lot," Haack said.

In response to board questions, Latincsics said this may be just the first of several variance applications for a 34-home subdivision called Stone Ridge that is being built on a 100-acre tract off Harrison Mountain Lake Road. The subdivision was approved by the Planning Board in 1989, but was sidetracked by an economic downturn. Housing construction, he said, only began recently.

Latincsics said home buyers want larger houses and that the Board of Health ordered that septic systems for five-bedroom homes be installed on each lot. The tracts range in size from one acre to more than three acres.

"It sounds like you are trying to fit a two-acre house on a one-acre lot," board member Jamison Van Eck said. "I can't see any hardship here, other than self-created hardship."

Van Eck was outvoted 3-1, however, as other Board of Adjustment members accepted Latincsics' arguments.

"In all reality, the Board of Health created the hardship," board member Christine Foster said.

In its approval, the board set a disturbance limit of 35 percent, rather than the nearly 38 percent requested by the developer. The vote could set a precedent for future development at Stone Ridge and elsewhere in Ringwood.

In other matters, a public hearing on a proposed assisted-living facility off Skyline Drive was postponed because there were only four board members present. Five are required by state law to consider a use variance. The hearing on the proposed Bald Eagle Suites project was rescheduled for Sept. 15.

E-mail: barry@northjersey.com

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