What Changed: How the Kenvue Site Came Out of Montgomery's Housing Plan

In June 2025, Montgomery Township’s Fourth Round housing plan put 417 residential units, 70 of them affordable, on the former Kenvue campus at 199 Grandview Road — the 382.771-acre former Johnson & Johnson property comprising Block 14001 Lot 2 and Block 13001 Lot 15, whose Limited Manufacturing core is about 257 acres. In March 2026, the Planning Board adopted an amended plan with the site removed entirely. This is how that happened.

June 2025: the plan, and the hearing

The plan, prepared by Clarke Caton Hintz and dated June 13, 2025, proposed 597 new units across its two large inclusionary sites, 106 of them affordable. Those two sites were 417 units on the Kenvue campus and 180 units at 23 Orchard Road. A third inclusionary mechanism sat on top of them: ten affordable assisted-living units, worth 20 credits by bed, at the Thrive continuing-care community. The rest of the plan came from 92 extensions of expiring affordability controls.

Residents saw the specifics when the roughly 800-page document went online on June 13, ten days before the June 23 Planning Board hearing. Legal notice had run in the Courier News the day before, on June 12. No mailed notice went to neighbors — staff explained that the 200-foot notice rule attaches to zoning changes and site plan applications, not master plan hearings.

The hearing ran about three hours in all — roughly the first half-hour the planner’s presentation, the rest questions — and it never reached the formal public-comment period. It was carried to June 26, four days before the statutory June 30 deadline. Former Mayor Devra Keenan walked the block and lot records aloud and argued that even if the portion she read as commercially assessed, about 160 acres, were rezoned for housing, residential zoning would yield between 16 and 80 homes, not 417. That was her arithmetic from the assessor’s records on the night, not an official subdivision of the site. George DeSanctis asked whether public comment could change anything at all. Shellie Jacobson established on the record that the concept plan demolished essentially every building on the site, including the headquarters building that residents told the Township Committee three weeks later was designed by Henry N. Cobb and W. Steven Wood of I.M. Pei & Partners — an attribution the plan itself passed over, having found that there are “no historic or architecturally important sites or buildings on the property.”

The township’s answer was not evasive, and it is worth stating fairly. Affordable-housing consultant Michael Sullivan told the board that if no plan were adopted by June 30 the township would lose its immunity from builder’s-remedy lawsuits, and cited South Brunswick and Englewood Cliffs as places that lost more than immunity. Asked what it would take to replace the Kenvue site, he ran the numbers live: roughly 706 units would have to be absorbed somewhere else in town, because dropping it loses the on-site inclusionary units, the redevelopment bonuses and the developer-funded off-site extensions at once. Asked what the contingency plan was if the Kenvue arrangement fell through, staff said earlier plans had sometimes carried alternatives but “we didn’t have any backup alternatives for this plan” — the board would have to come back and amend it.

One exchange that night went nowhere and later turned out to be the whole story. Asked why Pike Run — 210 affordable apartments, the largest such development in Montgomery — was not in the plan, staff said they had approached the owner and the owner would not agree to extend the controls.

The plan was adopted in June 2025.

November–December 2025: the mediation, and an unexplained reversal

Under the 2024 law that abolished COAH, disputes over Round Four plans go to an Affordable Housing Dispute Resolution Program. Objections to Montgomery’s plan had been filed. Mediation began with a Zoom session shortly after the November 13, 2025 Township Committee meeting.

On December 4, 2025, the township attorney reported the outcome in open session: Montgomery had formally notified the Program and every interested party, by letter, that it would amend its plan. The reason was Pike Run. The owner had come back to the table, and a verbal agreement in principle — not yet executed — to extend controls on at least 96 rental units was the piece that completed the plan. “96 does get us to the full plan,” she said, “and that is why there’ll be no other developments included in our housing plan” — naming Kenvue and Thrive as the ones coming out (video, 5:01).

It is worth being plain about the gap in this story. In June 2025 the Pike Run owner would not agree to extend the controls. By November 13, 2025 the owner had come back to the table: the township attorney told the Committee there was an agreement in principle with the Pike Run owner, which the township was working to turn into a memorandum of understanding, and the mayor thanked staff for a route that had been “getting harder because of not having the builder of Pike Run willing to work with us.” The public record does not explain why the owner changed position. The adopted plan says only that the owner “had not previously expressed interest” and that discussions after the June 2025 adoption made the amendment possible. We report the June 2025 answer and the November 2025 agreement in principle because both are documented, and we offer no theory about the space between them.

The township had already put money behind the alternative. Ordinance #25-1766, adopted December 4, 2025, appropriated $1,100,000 — $650,000 from the township’s COAH (affordable housing) trust fund and $450,000 authorized as bonds or notes — to pay owners of existing deed-restricted homes to extend their controls. One member described the trade honestly from the dais: other parties had offered to fund those extensions in exchange for staying in the plan, the community clearly did not want that, and so the township paid for them itself instead.

February–March 2026: the amendment

The Planning Board held an information session on February 9, 2026 — explicitly not a hearing, with no vote. Staff confirmed the removals and walked through the replacement credits, and made a point widely misunderstood since: a Housing Element sits inside the Master Plan, and a Master Plan is policy. It does not by itself rezone anything.

The hearing was noticed for February 23. It never happened — a blizzard closed it, and notice requirements carried it two weeks. The public hearing and adoption took place on March 9, 2026, presented by Township Administrator and Planning Director Lori Savron with board planner Michael Sullivan on the numbers. After about twenty minutes, at which no member of the public spoke, the board adopted the 2026 Amended Fourth Round Housing Element and Fair Share Plan 8-0, and memorialized it on a second 8-0 roll call.

After eight months of packed rooms, the meeting that removed the Kenvue site drew no public comment at all. The site is never named on the record that night. It is simply absent.

The Township Committee endorsed the amended plan on March 19, 2026. The township attorney told the Committee that all of the implementing documentation had been filed ahead of the March 16 deadline, and that she would advise the court that this one resolution had been delayed by the blizzard.

Credit where it is due

Planning Board Chairman Dave Campeas, quoted by The Monty News on February 17, 2026, put it this way: “The public spoke and we listened. We came up with a different plan that hopefully … makes a lot more sense for the township.”

Residents made clear they did not want a developer funding the township’s obligation in exchange for a place in the plan, and a member said as much from the dais on December 4, 2025. What followed is a matter of record rather than of cause: the extensions were paid for out of Ordinance #25-1766 — $650,000 from the township’s COAH trust fund and $450,000 in bonds or notes — rather than out of a developer’s construction budget.

What is still not finished

The case is not closed, and it is important not to pretend otherwise.

On March 5, 2026 the Township Committee was told that the Program judge had reported to the Mount Laurel judge that “there was not a consensus reached to the different objections,” and that a fairness hearing came next. On June 18, 2026 the Committee adopted Resolution #26-6-194, authorizing a written Fourth Round settlement agreement with Fair Share Housing Center; its recitals record that challenges to the original plan had been filed in 2025 by E. Kahn Development, Montgomery Neighbors United and Savemontgomery.org, and that Fair Share found the amended plan compliant subject to conditions.

Two other things stay open. The McKinley Court and McKinley Commons extensions are conditional — counsel told the Planning Board on March 9, 2026 that their inclusion is premised on mutually acceptable discussions with the owner, with controls running into the 2030s and the 2030 state midpoint review as the fallback checkpoint. Those two developments carry 110 of the plan’s 275 credits, which is more than the 15-credit surplus would cover. And the site itself is not settled: on September 17, 2026 the Township Committee sent Block 14001 Lot 2 to the Planning Board for a non-condemnation redevelopment study, at the owner’s request.

A settlement is not a judgment. On September 17, 2026 the township attorney told the Committee that the settlement “is not final until it is reviewed by the court and approved by the court in what’s called a compliance hearing,” and that the judge “has advised us that he will not entertain a compliance hearing until we have sat down with [E. Kahn] Development.” Without one, the attorney said, Montgomery is not in compliance and “we could lose our immunity from builder’s remedy lawsuits” (video, 56:40).

No compliance hearing has been held. No Judgment of Compliance and Repose and no Compliance Certification has issued. The Kenvue site is out of the plan, which is a real and hard-won change — and the plan that removed it still needs a judge.