UPPER FREEHOLD — Alternative measures may be the key to finally achieving a new master plan, according to township Planning Board officials.

Township Planner Richard Coppola presented members of the Planning Board with alternatives to the master plan at the April 22 meeting.

He described the proposed alternative measures "to increase the minimum and average lot size in the agricultural/residential district from the current 2 acres."

The township’s master plan review process has been bogged down after the board split in a 5-4 vote against raising the minimum amount of land required for a residential building lot from 2 acres to 4 acres last fall.

The board has been reviewing the plan for approximately two years.

According to 2001 data, which excludes the Heritage Green and Four Seasons developments, there were 1,688 total lots in the Agricultural Residential (AR) district, on a total of 21,735 acres. The average lot size was 12.88 acres. Coppola also said there has been some development on this acreage in the past two years, so current information would change, but only marginally.

He looked at number of existing lots and acreage in four different ranges of lot size: less than 2 acres; between 2 and 4 acres; 4 acres to less than 6 acres; and greater than 6 acres.

The number of lots that were less than 2 acres numbered 761, or 45 percent of the AR district. The total acreage of these lots is 587.5 acres, only 2.7 percent of the district.

In contrast, there were 515 lots which were larger than 6 acres, making up 30.5 percent of the AR zone.

Coppola sketched out three different possibilities for rezoning the township: increasing the minimum size required for a residential building lot to 3 acres; increasing the minimum size required for a residential building lot to 4 acres with a farmland/open space cluster option; and increasing the minimum lot size to 6 acres with a farmland/open space cluster option.

He explained that a farmland/open space cluster requires more than 150 acres of land. That land would not need to be contiguous, he said.

For example, two significant tracts of land could be preserved as farmland/open space, while a third tract could have hous­ing.

"There are movements of units among the land area," said Coppola.

The option would allow preservation of open space without going through the state farmland preservation program, which "is strapped for money," according to Cop­pola.

He gave the board a hypothetical exam­ple.

A 150-acre unencumbered tract would have 15 percent of its property utilized for roads and other incidental requirements for development.

With the current 2-acre zoning, that tract would yield 63 lots. However, under three acres, it would yield 42 lots; four acres would bring the total up to 31 lots, while a 6-acre requirement would yield 21 lots.

Density bonus lots for pieces of prop­erty placed into preservation programs were also an option, said Coppola. If 75 acres of a hypothetical 150-acre tract were preserved, the remaining 75 acres would get a 35 percent bonus for development. Under the bonus option, 57 lots could be developed on 63.5 acres, using the 3-acre base zoning.

Former township official Bob Freiberger, who was in the audience, ob­served that a lot of Coppola’s options "have merit."

He suggested a farmland/open space tax be enacted for developers, and "have the fee high enough to encourage them to go with less lots. Reduce the fee in certain increments. It will reduce the number of houses and increase the amount of money so Upper Freehold can buy open space for those [developers] who don’t want to pay."

He noted that in downzoning to 4 acres, "we could lose farmland preserva­tion funds because it is already deed-re­stricted."