Just weeks after [Newtown Township] supervisors declined to approve Toll Brothers application to build 45 high-end single-family homes on a tract of land off of Durham and Twining Bridge roads, the board is now reconsidering whether to support the developer’s conditional-use request to avoid any legal challenges.
At its March meeting, the supervisors were poised to vote on the developers’ application, but decided to table the motion after several neighboring residents again voiced their opposition to the project on the 158-acre tract which is near the Newtown Township municipal complex
When the residents attending the meeting questioned why the board does not simply reject Toll’s application, [township solicitor] Sander quickly replied that the developer would most likely take the township to Bucks County Common Pleas Court, and in all likelihood win.
According to the township solicitor, Toll is permitted to build a cluster development on land which is zoned B-12 in the Conservation Management (CM) Zoning District, but needs conditional-use approval by the board of supervisors to do so.
The court would most likely overturn any municipal challenge to that application, with the judge directing the project to move forward over any township dissent.
In addition, Sander warned that if the supervisors do reject the application, then Toll would be allowed to build up to 61 single family homes, each on about three acres with no open space. That’s because the developer has the right to do so under the zoning now applicable to that property.
“If that happened, there would be about 50-percent more traffic,” Sander warned.
[The Board of Supervisors (BOS) is scheduled to vote on this application at its August 26, 2020, LIVE public meeting. More about this here.]
If the conditional-use application is formally denied, then Toll Brothers would have 30 days to file an appeal in county court.
Meanwhile, the developer’s revised plan calls for a cluster development on B-12 zoned land which would take up only a small portion, roughly 36-acres, of the 158-acre tract on the southwest corner of Durham Road (Rte. 413) and Twining Bridge Road, which lies just north of the township’s municipal complex.
Because the parcel is zoned Conservation Management (CM), a cluster development is allowed by use, but not by right, so that’s why Toll needed the conditional-use approval instead of a zoning change.
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