Another NJ town pushes back — this is basically a weekly column now

I'm starting to lose count of how many of these I've written this summer, and I mean that as a compliment to the residents, not a complaint about the workload. Diamond Beach. Andover. Hillsborough. Manchester. Franklin Township. Howell. Now North Brunswick. At this point I'm putting out close to one of these a week, towns fighting back against something, whether it's parking, property taxes, AI data centers, or warehouses, and actually winning.

North Brunswick Township Council announced this week it will not move forward with a proposed 300,000-square-foot warehouse redevelopment at 100 Fidelity Plaza, according to NJ.com, after the plan drew intense opposition from residents. Seagris Property Group bought the 87-acre property back in 2023 for $14.8 million, with plans for a 50-foot-tall warehouse running around the clock, complete with 55 loading docks and 52 truck parking spaces.

The money was real. The town said no anyway

This wasn't a small deal to walk away from. Under the redevelopment plan, the township stood to collect roughly $20 million over 30 years through a PILOT agreement, the kind of arrangement that lets a town keep nearly all the tax payments instead of splitting them with the school board and county. Mayor Francis Womack announced in a Facebook post that the ordinance to adopt the plan won't be introduced, considered, or placed on any future council agenda. "This plan could only have been feasible if done in a way that would not impair the aesthetics of the area and the quality of life for nearby neighborhoods," Womack said, adding plainly that the council "concluded that the currently proposed plan does not serve the best interests of our community."

SEE ALSO: Howell just banned data centers. It's the 33rd NJ town to do it.

Residents showed up, and they were specific about why

At a June 29 council meeting, residents raised diesel exhaust from round-the-clock trucks, noise pollution, and increased traffic on both Route 1 and Route 130, already two of the busiest corridors in that part of the state. The plan's scope went beyond the warehouse itself too. It originally included a 10,000-square-foot data center that would have drawn roughly 20 megawatts of electricity and needed 150,000 gallons of water a day just for cooling towers.

And then the town went a step further

After the pushback, the council didn't just kill this one project. It voted unanimously to table the plan entirely and introduced a separate ordinance banning data centers township-wide, while also amending the 100 Fidelity Plaza proposal itself to exclude data centers as a permitted use going forward. That makes North Brunswick the latest in a growing list of towns choosing to get ahead of this fight instead of relitigating it project by project.

Why I keep writing these

I'll keep saluting these residents for stepping up and speaking out, because it wasn't always like this. A few years ago, there seemed to be real apathy around these kinds of issues. Residents stayed quiet. They stayed home and watched whatever was on primetime instead of showing up to a 7 p.m. council meeting. I've got a theory, and it's as good as any other. Maybe controlling when you watch a show instead of the show controlling you is exactly what freed people up to go sit in a folding chair at a township meeting instead. Or maybe it's simpler than that. Maybe, to borrow a line from a movie four decades old, people are just mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. That kind of spirit is what this radio station was built on in the first place, and it's the reason I don't think I'll be running out of these stories anytime soon.