Planning Board Approves New Route 9 Business

If everything goes according to plan a new business could open in town providing area residents a new location for bagels and pizza. 

The planning board approved an application at its meeting on Thursday night allowing a New York Water Bagel and Pizza to be built on the site of the abandoned WaWa near Strickland Rd. According to the lawyer for the applicant in 2008 the board granted approval for a Caribou Coffee Shop but those plans fell through. 

Following the basic layout of that approved application, the newest version reduced the proposed seating in the restaurant from 58 seats to 30. Other than that, the basic plans remained the same. 

Brian McLean, the owner of the business who also owns similar establishments in and Seaside Heights said the Howell location would open at 6 as a bagel place and close at 11 at night as a pizza place. Another feature of the location would be a drive through for the bagel services but not pizza. 

While there would be some overlap between the functions, McLean said that would be limited. "The bagel business after 12:00 is very slow," he said. The store would also only have a maximum of five employees working at a time helping to cut down on congestion in the parking lot. 

Also testifying for the applicant was engineer Gregory Ploussas who said the only changes to the plan for the building was the elimination of two doors in the rear of the building and moving one door on the side. When the Caribou application had been approved one of those doors was to serve as an entrance to the restaurant while the other was for a storage area.

In an effort to make the application as smooth as possible even the size and heights of the originally proposed signs will remain the same for the newest version.  

Board Engineer Laura Neumann said a considerable amount of work had gone into making the Caribou plans acceptable which also helped this application. "We spent a significant portion of time speaking about this when this application was initially in," she said of the traffic patterns on the relatively small space. "The applicant's engineer was required to do a lot of modifications by way of signage on this map, as well as pedestrian crosswalks and extending stop bars." She added, "The board was very cautious and required a lot of additional traffic control measures."

Board member Maria Portilla had a few questions about the layout of the location as well as the placement of a tree on the plans. The applicant was able to answer those questions Portilla to vote in favor of the application. In the end the application was approved unanimously.