Zoning Board of Adjustment - Regular Meeting

Testing. One, two, three. Testing. Okay.

Okay. Please turn off all cell phones. The agenda of the Pumpkin Lake Zoning Board of Adjustments, May 26, 2026. The following is the agenda of the regular meeting of the Pumpkin Lake Zoning Board of Adjustments. The meeting is to be held in a municipal building, 25 Lenox Avenue, on Tuesday, May 26, 2026, beginning at 8 p.m. A written advance notice as required by NJSA 10-4-1 has been provided of this meeting at least 48 hours in advance of today, given the date, time, and location, and to the extent known, the time and the agenda of this meeting. Such notice stated that formal action may or may not be taken. This meeting will be video recorded and will be broadcast later for later viewing for the public. The notice was posted on the bulletin board outside the offices of the municipal clerk reserved for this and some other similar announcements provided to the record newspaper designated by the council and zoning board to receive such notices and filed with the borough clerk. We stand for budget allegiance.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

We have no oath of office. Can I get a roll call, please?

Mr. Hunt?

Here.

Mr. Abik? Here. Mr. Koss?

Here.

Ms. Bernstock? Here. Mr. Rowan? Here.

Mr. Favula?

Here.

Mr. Devante?

Here.

Mr. Klaus?

Here.

Ms. Hazelman? Here. Mayor Serra? Here. And Mr. Brewer?

Here. Okay. We have no minutes to go over, so we'll bypass that. Can I get a motion to approve the bills?

I'll make a motion we pay the bills.

It's Rowan.

And I'll second it. It's Maureen.

Roll call, please.

Mr. Hunt?

Yes.

Mr. Aviv?

Yes.

Mr. Todd?

Yes.

Mr. Bermkopf? Yes. Mr. Rowan?

Yes.

Mr. Fugula? Yes.

Mr. Vontae?

Yes.

Okay. Correspondence, there's a couple ordinances that came out. Anybody have any questions on those ordinances or statements about the ordinances?

I have a statement on the animal feeding. I just find it'll be interesting to see how that goes within our town. I think it's necessary, but as far as the enforcement, I'm not clear on exactly how that works.

We do not want to find that's not the goal of this is. This is to educate people. So we're going to do a big educational push. We'll get a couple of warnings. But we have some people putting a few pound bags in the pier on their property. And it's not fair to the neighbors around them that they're doing that. So we'll tell them, you're not supposed to do this. No ticket or nothing. But if they keep doing it, unfortunately, it's going to end up like this.

No, I support that. I'm just curious about how the enforcement action would, like, as a neighbor, how do I, can I kind of go on the slide, or is my name going to be, like, recorded? I have to give my name.

No, the animal control officer, she was able to write tickets.

So it will be, in other words, you will not know who the person is that made the complaint. Okay, in that case, we got it. Except you just did it on record.

Can I add to that? My neighbor feeds birds and they poop all over our cars. That's going to be allowed if you read the subject.

If it's songbirds.

A curved feeder of X amount of inches or something.

I mean, this guy actually takes a big bag and just throws the stuff in the driveway.

A lot of the things we address, which we had residents a couple years ago asking about chickens and roosters. And then with some research, we realized you don't need a rooster to have eggs. which you may know about. So we said no more roosters because that was part of the issue. But people who have these animals are already moving their property in. They just can't buy another one. And we reduced the number of chickens you can have. We understand people want to do this, but it also has to fit with the property they have. That's where the real problem is. You can't put a whole chicken coop on your neighbor's line and have issues with your neighborhood.

What's the number of chickens you can have?

On an acre or? No, it's on a case-by-case basis. So if the building board goes there and says, look, if you're putting it in the middle of your property, the best place it can be, then we'll probably say okay to that. If you're putting it in your back corner and you have an acre right there, it's probably saying no, it's not important. But there's no set amount of space.

No, I meant if there was a set number of chickens per joint. No, we're sorry.

Don't worry, my chickens aren't coming to Pompidou. My chickens will stay where they're at. But it's more about the deer, too. We have a big concern. The president's not understanding that even though you want the deer all over your property, your neighbors probably don't. And they're coming through the neighbors' properties and out of the neighbors' houses while we're going to get them out of your property. We get a lot of complaints. It causes bad blood.

I just find that the deer, they don't even move now. They actually come towards you. And when you're walking your dog or something like that, deer don't move.

We have an issue where I'm at where there's a black bear that comes and takes garbage all the time. A black bear. It's big. And a bunch of the neighbors just put their garbage out in bags instead of putting cans. But I'm in an HOA. I guess I would discuss that with the HOA.

But that's something that your board should reach out to the Avenue Control to do education Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's enormous. It was in my driveway when I came home the other night. It was like a small car size. I couldn't believe it. And where is that? Highlands. Okay. No, I was scared the hell out of me. I have my little baby with me.

What about bats? Anybody else have any problems with bats? No. No. and see if you can wrap bones.

Most people don't realize we have bat nesting boxes down here in the MUA. Houses used to be there. If you see those big holes, there's a house up there with bat nesting. You can try to bring bats from anybody's house to use those. Because they're a good avenue to have bats. Well, I can attest

police are very good at fact control. Our cat had gone and brought it into the house and I was able to sweep it out the front door and I thought that was the end of it. The next morning It was still alive, and the cat pointed out to get it. And I called the police. I said, I don't know who to call. And I've never had a bat bomb before. So they said to me, when the shift changed, they'd send someone over. And they did. And the man, the poor charleman, said to me, show me your shed. So I brought him back to the shed. He chose his weapon. And then he took care of the bed. So he's very grateful for that.

So we share a shared service we have with Butler. So it's a full-time position.

Okay, so we'll move on. Applications, we have none. We have a resolution, BOA 26-01. Everyone had the opportunity to read the resolution? Anybody have any statements? Sorry?

That was a pretty easy meeting for her to know.

If none, can I get a motion to accept the resolution?

So moved.

Can we get a second? Second. Mr. Bate. Roll call, please. Mr. Hunt? Yes.

Mr. Bate?

Yes.

Mr. Cox?

Yes.

Yes. Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Okay. New unfinished business. We'll look to Mr. Cross. Anything going on with open space?

Well, there's no environmental meeting which precedes the open space. Okay. And we have a special guest speaker. I'll tell you that in a minute. But...

It was just a couple things. Now, the Herfield Park Bridge. Is the walkway finished now? It's open?

Okay. And it looks very nice down there. The Willow Field. The lightning detector is in down there. Which works off of... It's from Lakeside, right?

But it's connected to... Yeah, it's connected to Riverdale and Lakeside. Okay. The donation by...

Rotary, right?

Also, down at Hirschfield, the field house is done completely now, correct? And so the only thing was finishing the actual road inside, correct?

Right, so stage three of that project at Hirschfield, it's not going to happen until they... in the spring, fall maybe, so we do all pathways down there. So we're trying to go back to what we had, which was pavement. You guys remember we used to have pavement there. And then 10 years ago, we decided, let's try this readable asphalt, which just cracked and broke. But the problem is, the gate people let us go backwards. So we made that as well. They said, you have to keep that. So we're fighting with them now to see if we can get that back.

So the special guest we had was State County Commissioner Michael Remaglia, who's a town resident also for Bumper Lakes. And he took people's questions, and he's him and Mr. Mayer spoke. And he had a lot of information. He mentioned that Pompton Lakes was one of the top five or six towns that asked for money and used it, and they liked that. Instead of taking it and putting it away and wanting it for another project, they liked how we used it, and that looks good for the future.

There are some towns that take the money and then they reduce it, and they have to give it back. Because all that trouble has to come from money, literally.

Yes, and that looks good for the future, any projects, because they'd be quick to give us money again. And Mike, being a town resident, Get a little oomph out of him for pushing for ponds next.

That's great.

So that was about it, really. It was a quick meeting because he spoke, him and his assistant spoke most of the time.

The willow field is completely done. In fact, right now they're spraying really good on ice, trying to grow the grass and keep people off the grass for the next month so the grass can grow in and around the field. We've got new springboarders and for anybody who's, you know, we're all older here so we all know that. We used to have a park against the fence. We came down and we don't want to park against the fence anymore. They planted trees there. So we got off to the park there.

We closed off the road and had a snack stand so you can't drive past the snack stand anymore.

So this is to help with the kids running all over the place down there. You know, they used to run across, especially the young ones, used to run across that road all the time. So we're trying. The next thing we're going to try to do with help with BP locally is Maybe try to make a U-turn within the property to come out through where the houses were and back out. So you don't have double traffic coming in. So the only issue we have right now down there is that we discussed this open space and put a brand new sign, open space paid for for Joe Grill. The problem is we have Willow Field Complex down there too. And when out of town people are coming in, they don't know Willow Field is there because they see the Joe Grill sign and they say, I must be in the wrong place. We've got to drive in more to see the Willow Field. So we're going to put another sign out that basically says this is Joe Willow and Willow Field Complex together.

Is that sign going to be more on this when you first enter?

Yeah, we're going to at least put an arrow and then have a better sign to deal with space committee members and things down further, but at least let people know you're in the right spot. So if you get any of this, you're going to turn around.

And Maria Kent was saying she wanted to get names put on it also to let people know who did it. Yeah, yeah. Like the current mayor and council?

Yeah, yeah. And that was it, really. Anything else, Mary, like that?

No, I mean, I think you covered it well.

You know, if you haven't been down at Hershfield, we've done real great.

We've got a nice employment company. We've got that. Next year, we're going to build a bridge at West Lenox. We're going to build a mass.

Same thing, same bridge. And then we take ownership of that bridge. I know there's a lot of noise on social media now about what we're going to do, what we're going to call it. We own the bridge. We own the bridge. So we'll see where that goes with that.

And the new field house looks great down at Hirshfield. It's great for the rec department now.

We're going to put a big summer camp out of there with lots of new systems and everything out of that. So we'll move along with the healthy open space. We're getting out there money. We spend the money. We use that open space.

The balance is? $338,934. That's Joe Grill and Hershfield and everything paid for, too.

That's the actual balance.

Yeah, for the bird's nest.

So yeah, we're trying to help with the development-wise. That's the first meeting we will be renting out that building to the public. So that's a new thing for that. And that building was all donated by Meridian. Meridian is ready to open, hopefully September. The CGM building is moving along slowly, but it's moving. We had a couple plans come to the last board meetings. for the rescue station in the corner there. They're looking at remodeling that and doing that. There's still some conversation on that. It's still going to go through the processes. But they listened to what the board had said. The board had told them they thought the project was too big for that corner. And they took a whole floor off of their plans. The idea to do this is to keep the retail. So they initially got rid of all the retail and added their own retail package.

Any movement from the teen center or somewhere other kids can go?

That's a tough one, because we had a teen center for many, many years, and then it died, and so it died. Our kids weren't showing up to it. When my kids were young, there was probably a lot of people in there that went to St. Mary's, because that's where the kids went to. St. Mary's had a teen center. And then we got our own here at the theater. There hasn't been a big ask done for it. If the public wants it, they should really have it.

Okay, public discussion. I open up the meeting for the public. And since I see no one, I will close that session. Can I get a motion for adjournment?

Can I make a motion? Second.

Hold on.

First? Rich.

Rich. Second. Mark. Mark. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Nay. Thank you all for coming. See you next month.

See you next month.