The Kenvue Site

The 2025 Housing Element and Fair Share Plan gives the property as 382.771 acres, comprising Block 14001 Lot 2 and Block 13001 Lot 15. E. Kahn's engineer, Matt Adams, describing the same holding aloud to the Planning Board in September 2025, broke it into three tax parcels: roughly 125 acres north of Grandview Road, split about one-third into the Mountain Residential 10-acre zone and two-thirds into the R5 five-acre zone; a main parcel of, in his words, 257 plus or minus acres in the Limited Manufacturing zone; and a parcel a little over two acres to the south.

The third figure, 160 acres, is not an official subdivision of anything. It comes from a resident reading the assessor's records aloud at the June 23, 2025 hearing: former Mayor Devra Keenan put the commercially assessed (class 4B) portion of the main parcel at about 160 acres, at a net assessed value of roughly $41 million, with a further 97 acres nearby carried as farm-qualified. The observation that those two figures land near the 257 was hers, made live from the records that night. No township document divides the Limited Manufacturing core that way.

The campus was Johnson & Johnson's, and later Kenvue's. Residents told the Township Committee on July 17, 2025 that its late-modern headquarters building was designed by Henry N. Cobb and W. Steven Wood of I.M. Pei & Partners, with oversight by Pei himself. The township's own 2025 housing plan did not acknowledge that attribution: it found there are “no historic or architecturally important sites or buildings on the property.” In 2024 Kenvue told the township it was moving its offices to a smaller footprint in Summit, and it has been winding the campus down ever since — the last of its operations end in 2026. The township's affordable-housing counsel told the Township Committee on September 17, 2026 that Kenvue would cease operations at the site by the end of the year.

One detail from the middle of the story is worth keeping: in June 2025, while the township was planning 417 homes on the property, the buyer had not closed. Former Mayor Devra Keenan told the board the deed still read Johnson & Johnson; staff would say only that they were working with “the contract purchaser,” though the plan itself named E. Kahn Development as the developer.

A legal notice published on June 12, 2025 set a Planning Board hearing on the Fourth Round Housing Element and Fair Share Plan. Its two inclusionary sites came to 597 units between them, 106 of them affordable homes built on site — a total Headline News Montgomery reported, rather than one the plan states. The Kenvue site alone carried 417 residential units, 70 of them affordable, and would have required the campus to be demolished; the other 180 units, 36 affordable, went to 23 Orchard.

For scale: at the June 23, 2025 hearing former Mayor Devra Keenan, working from the acreage she had just read out of the assessor's records, said that portion of the site could support roughly 16 to 80 homes under its existing zoning. The plan's number was not an increment on what the zoning allowed. It was a different order of thing, and it depended on the site being treated as an inclusionary development.

The hearing on June 23, 2025 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 ended with no vote and was carried to June 26 at 5 p.m., four days before the June 30 statutory deadline to adopt a plan. The Planning Board adopted the plan at that continued hearing.

Former Mayor Devra Keenan set the 417 units against what the zoning actually allowed — 16 homes, or 32, or at most 80: “Why would we all of a sudden say, oh, 412 is totally fine? That's very problematic.” Resident Shellie Jacobson raised the demolition of the I.M. Pei building. Others asked what the township would do if the site fell through, and were told there was no alternative in reserve.

On July 17, 2025 residents took the same case to the Township Committee. Save Montgomery — a grassroots group of Montgomery Township residents, represented by the attorney Bruce Afran — formed around that position: not opposed to affordable housing, opposed to the process and to high-density development on this site.

The first mediation session with the court program was held on November 14, 2025. On December 4, 2025 the township attorney told the Township Committee that Montgomery had notified the program and the parties, by letter, that it would amend its plan, and that with the Pike Run extensions counted, no other development — the Kenvue site included — needed to stay in it. The mechanics had been put in place three weeks earlier: on November 13 the Committee introduced Ordinance #25-1766, appropriating $1,100,000 — $650,000 from the township's COAH trust fund and $450,000 authorised as bonds or notes — and adopted resolutions extending affordability controls at McKinley Court and Montgomery Glen. Preserving existing affordable homes would replace building new ones.

What made that arithmetic work was Pike Run. Staff had told the Planning Board on June 23, 2025 that the township approached the owner of its 210 affordable rentals and that the owner “were not able to agree to extend the controls.” By November 13, 2025 the township attorney was reporting an agreement in principle with that owner, which the township was working to turn into a memorandum of understanding; on December 4 she described it as a verbal agreement in principle, not yet executed, covering at least 96 units. The public record does not explain why the owner's position changed. Nothing on this site offers a theory about it. The sequence is set out in full on the housing page.

The amended plan was presented at a Planning Board information session on February 9, 2026, posted on February 13, and carried by the Planning Board on March 9 after the February 23 hearing was cancelled by a blizzard. The Township Committee endorsed it on March 19. Two other sites came out at the same time: 23 Orchard Road, and Thrive Assisted Living, whose credits were deferred to a future round.

The clearest measure of the change is negative. At the March 9, 2026 adoption hearing the Kenvue site is never mentioned. It simply is not in the plan the board adopted. How the 260-unit obligation is met instead is the subject of our Round Four explainer.

In October 2025, before closing, E. Kahn filed a general development plan for light industrial use. The Planning Board did not hear it: Montgomery has no ordinance authorising general development plan review, and no standards for one. The developer sued the board over the refusal. Board attorney Karen Cayci explained the appeal of the instrument — a general development plan takes less documentation than a full application and, where the ordinance exists, can shield a project from later zoning changes for years.

The purchase completed in or around December 2025 or early January 2026; that is the only dating the public record gives. Who holds the deed now is itself contested: a resident told officials in February and again in September 2026 that the deeds of record name four single-member limited liability companies rather than E. Kahn Development Corp., while the township attorney said in September 2026 that the site “is solely owned now by” E. Kahn Development. This page reports the disagreement rather than resolving it. Kahn told residents in February 2026 that he would meet neighbours again sometime in March. On April 15, 2026 the company filed a site plan application for an industrial project, which was declared administratively complete on June 9, 2026 and is still pending before the Planning Board.

The developer's account of how it arrived here comes from the press, not the meeting record. Eli Kahn told The Monty News in February 2026 that township officials had suggested to him fifteen months earlier that they wanted affordable housing on the site, and that he was still trying to learn what the township would accept:

The meeting record cuts the other way. Five months before that interview, at the September 8, 2025 Planning Board meeting, E. Kahn's own planner told the board “the township did not lead us in any direction” on the alternative concepts.

The point that makes the industrial concept matter politically is that it needs nobody's permission on density. Light manufacturing is what the Limited Manufacturing zone is for. A site plan that conforms to the zoning is reviewed for its engineering, not for whether the township wants it. That is the fact underneath both the township's willingness to study a redevelopment designation and the residents' unwillingness to see one.

On June 8, 2026 the Planning Board recommended the ordinance and, in the same minutes, found it consistent with the Master Plan. The board also asked the governing body to exempt the Montgomery Township Police Department from the definition of a detention center, because as drafted the prohibition appeared to outlaw the township's own holding cells. The adopted text contains no such carve-out.

The Township Committee adopted Ordinance No. 26-1779 on June 18, 2026 by 4 to 0. That is not a five-member unanimous vote: Deputy Mayor Vince Barragan resigned effective that evening, the seat was vacant for the vote, and Patricia Taylor Todd was elected Deputy Mayor and sworn in the same night. The operative sentence is short: “Data centers are specifically prohibited throughout Montgomery Township.” The stated rationale was energy usage, increased electrical demand, noise from cooling equipment and large water consumption, and the ordinance recites the general purpose of ensuring orderly development and protecting existing residential, commercial and environmental resources.

The public hearing drew both sides. Craig Gianetti of Day Pitney LLP appeared for E. Kahn Development in opposition. Speaking in support were Dawn Cohen; Mary Reece, chair of the Montgomery Environmental Commission; Nancy Herrington; Mike Pisauro, policy director of The Watershed Institute, who said the Institute was part of a coalition seeking a statewide data-center moratorium and cited New Jersey drought conditions, cost increases across the PJM region and a noise lawsuit over a Vineland data center; Jenny Psaki of Cranford; and Kendra DiPaola.

On July 31, 2026 E. Kahn Development Corp. filed suit in Somerset County Superior Court seeking a declaration that Ordinance 26-1779 is invalid and unenforceable, together with an injunction against its enforcement. The complaint argues that the Planning Board's June 8 recommendation lacked a documented discussion of whether the ordinance was consistent with the township Master Plan.

That allegation can be checked against the record, and it is worth checking. The approved June 8, 2026 minutes state that the board found the ordinance to be consistent with the Master Plan. Whether that finding is sufficient is a question for the court, and this page does not guess at the answer.

Resolution #26-9-260 directs the Planning Board to conduct a preliminary investigation into whether the property at 199 Grandview Road designated as Lot 2 in Block 14001 meets the criteria for designation as a non-condemnation redevelopment area. Resolution #26-9-261 authorises an escrow funding agreement with E. Kahn Development Corp. to pay the costs of that study.

Three limits belong with any account of this vote. The study covers only Block 14001 Lot 2 — not Block 13001 Lot 15, the other parcel. The designation contemplated is non-condemnation, which carries no eminent-domain power. And the vote was 4 to 0 with Committeeman Mike Martin absent; Mayor Singh said on the record that he was sick. Herring, Ahn, Deputy Mayor Taylor Todd and Mayor Singh voted yes. The township attorney stressed that the study authorises no plan and approves no project; a planner's report goes to the Planning Board in public before anything else can happen.

Asked directly by resident Paul Hao whether the resolutions had been requested by the developer or were the committee's own idea, the answer from the dais was unambiguous.

Two members explained their votes. Committee Member Ahn framed a yes as preserving options — he said the study could let the township look at hospitals and other possibilities — against a by-right limited manufacturing facility that would bring a lot of trucks and lights at night. Deputy Mayor Taylor Todd said: “I want us to have options and the ability to have a say in what happens. So I'm voting yes.”

Bruce Afran's statement for Save Montgomery was read into the public record that night. It argued that a designation “will fail in the courts if it amounts to cherry picking isolated incidents of repair or maintenance needs, and fails to identify true blight on the property,” and that “the Kenvue buildings are largely in a pristine state and are well suited to their intended uses, or can be adaptively reused.” Save Montgomery said it intends to use all the resources at its disposal to fight the study and to oppose any plans for a high-density housing development on the site.

Mayor Singh set it out on September 17, 2026, after the township's affordable-housing counsel told the Committee that Kenvue would cease operations at the site by the end of the year. The township expects a revenue gap of roughly $1.4 million a year as a result, and the owner has already signalled that he will seek a tax appeal once the buildings empty — which, if successful, would widen the gap rather than close it. Singh also said the township had approached the New Jersey EDA and Somerset County about buying the property, without success.

Set against that is the by-right alternative. If nothing changes, the owner can build light manufacturing without asking the township's permission on density, and the traffic figures in the table above are the developer's own. A redevelopment designation would give the township a seat it does not otherwise have. That is the case the four members who voted yes actually made.

The counter-argument is equally concrete. A designation requires the property to meet statutory criteria, and Save Montgomery's position is that buildings in good condition do not meet them. Both propositions will be tested by the planner's report, in public, before the Planning Board.

• The study. The Planning Board conducts the preliminary investigation and reports in public. Only after that can the Township Committee consider a designation, and only for Block 14001 Lot 2, and only on a non-condemnation basis.
• The industrial site plan. Filed April 15, 2026, administratively complete since June 9, 2026, and still unscheduled.
• The data-center suit. Filed July 31, 2026; the township said on September 17 that it had not been served.
• The housing case. Settled with Fair Share Housing Center, but not certified by the court. See Round Four, Explained.

All of these are decided in public meetings. The Township Committee generally meets on the first and third Thursday of the month; the Planning Board generally on the second and fourth Monday; the Zoning Board of Adjustment generally on the fourth Tuesday. All three move and skip meetings, so check the township's board meeting calendar before you go.