The saga over the fate of the abandoned Spring Air mattress factory at 170 Schuyler Ave. continued into its sixth month of testimony at a Dec. 12 zoning board meeting.
The board cut the applicant’s testimony off at 9:30 p.m., bringing cries from the public to continue. "We’ll wait!," yelled one attendee.
Babcock & Brown Storage Specialists Development, LLC and Hackensack/Bogota Properties, LLC first came to the board with plans to convert the property into a storage facility in July. Since then, they have consulted with neighbors to address their concerns in hopes of getting the use variance required to run the facility in the residential neighborhood.
Geraldine Road and Halsey Place residents came to a zoning board meeting in 2004 with complaints about their neighbors, Spring Air Mattress Partners. The application to put a cell phone tower on top of the building was turned down, but the entire matter was largely irrelevant to members of the public venting about noise at all hours of the week on the property.
Attorneys arguing for the use variance claimed the self-storage facility use would bring the highest amount of ratables with the lowest impact on services to the property.
The board told the attorneys they would like the facility, if built, to be closed on Sundays and open from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. during the rest of the week. The attorneys were agreeable to keeping the facilities open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., despite the fact that similar facilities are open from 6 a.m. until 10 p.m., or even 24 hours a day, seven days a week. However, they were hesitant to give up Sundays.
Closing the facility for a weekend day would hurt business, said attorney Armen McOmber. "Why would you go to this facility when you can go to another one five miles away that is open on Sundays?" he asked.
Zoning board President Nick Antonicello noted that retail business in Bergen County, including malls, are closed on Sundays but still manage to compete. Vice President Richard Glennon agreed. "We have a blue law that shuts down Paramus," he said.
McOmber also noted that the bowling alley next door is open on Sundays and sells alcohol. "We want to be competitive and we want to make money, obviously," said McOmber.
Project manager Herb Reynolds said he would be willing to close the main office on Sunday, but would not close the facility completely. As a condition of approval, McOmber said they would agree to closing at 6 p.m. on Sundays.
The board also wanted the attorneys to prove if there was even a demand for a self-storage business in North Arlington. Currently, there are self-storage businesses in both Lyndhurst and Kearny to the north and south of North Arlington.
Reynolds said that within a three-mile radius of 170 Schuyler Ave., there is currently 3.2 square feet of storage space per person, well below what the company considers enough to meet the demand.
Reynolds analyzed data from an Extra Space facility in Lyndhurst and found it was 93-percent occupied and 16 percent of the customers were from North Arlington.
Attorneys for Self Storage Specialists told the board the facility would pay an estimated $195,000 in property taxes. However, McOmber said this figure was not an "iron-clad guarantee." Currently, the Begoon Brothers, who own the property, pay about $65,000 per year in property taxes, said McOmber.
Antonicello raised serious questions about security at self-storage facilities during an earlier meeting. Reynolds said he would address those concerns by making an addendum to the lease to allow the company to search storage spaces.
Hackensack/Bogota properties attorney Paul Gavin went to several storage facilities in the area and found that most take cash, do not fingerprint and do not make copies of driver’s licenses. Unlike other storage facilities, using examples in Kearny and Englewood, the facility in North Arlington would fingerprint customers and make copies of their driver’s license. The company would also allow the police into the building to make suggestions regarding security cameras.
The site would not be staffed all the time and customers would be able to enter and exit the facility using an electronic pin code.
While this did not assure all of the board’s security concerns, McOmber emphasized that the company was going above and beyond the standard. "There is no commercial use in the world that isn’t without incident," he added.
