Timeline

Kenvue’s departure has been in progress since 2024, but the operational end date matters on its own, and it is the reason the township leaned on hardest when it defended acting rather than waiting.

The township attorney said operations at the site end by the close of 2026. Mayor Singh put the numbers on the record the same night: a roughly $1.4 million annual gap in tax revenue, and E. Kahn Development signalling a tax appeal. That was not a surprise from nowhere. The developer’s own presenter told the Planning Board in September 2025 that the property was assessed at $41.6 million, was Montgomery’s second-largest tax generator, was over-assessed by more than 60 percent in his view, and that “a tax appeal will be coming,” which he estimated at a short-term reduction of $700,000 to $800,000 a year.

This is the fiscal case the township made from the dais — the resolution itself recites only the statutory criteria, and the dais confirmed the same night that the study was the developer’s request — and it deserves to be stated as the township states it. A large ratable going quiet is a real municipal problem whatever one thinks of the remedy. It is also worth keeping in proportion: the appeal turns on what the property is worth, and the argument the presenter made for that was a use argument — a 1970s single-tenant office campus, he said, now trades at land value minus demolition. A redevelopment designation does not by itself replace a dollar of revenue either.

The quiet item of the night, added after the ordinance everyone had come for. The resolution passed 4-0 — a four-member Committee voting, the fifth seat vacant since Vince Barragan’s resignation was announced at the start of the same meeting.

Its recitals are useful history, and they are the best primary chronology of the case on the public record: the declaratory judgment action filed January 29, 2025 (Docket No. SOM-L-153-25, from the caption read into the March 19, 2026 minutes); Judge Mennen’s March 27, 2025 order setting the obligations; the Land Use Board’s adoption of the original plan on June 26, 2025; challenges filed in 2025 by E. Kahn, by Montgomery Neighbors United and by Savemontgomery.org; the Program decision of March 4, 2026 and the court’s acceptance of it on March 5; the amended plan filed with the court March 11, 2026; and Fair Share Housing Center — the statewide affordable-housing advocate that is a party to the case — finding the amended plan compliant subject to conditions.

A settlement is a real step, but it is not a judgment. And this settlement is with Fair Share Housing Center, which had asked only for more documentation — not with E. Kahn, the party that fought the plan. The judge has said he will not entertain a compliance hearing until the township sits down with E. Kahn. As of September 2026 no compliance hearing had been held and no Judgment of Compliance and Repose or Compliance Certification had issued, which is why the township’s immunity from builder’s-remedy lawsuits remained contingent.

Barragan had been re-elected only seven months earlier, in November 2025, and had sat as Deputy Mayor through the whole period in which the Kenvue site came out of the housing plan — though he was absent from the March 19, 2026 meeting that endorsed the amended plan. The minutes record the resignation as effective June 18, 2026 and give no reason. From the dais that night, the newly sworn Deputy Mayor Taylor Todd said Barragan had moved out of town and had said so in his resignation letter. Dennis Ahn nominated Patricia Taylor Todd as Deputy Mayor, Mike Martin seconded, and she was elected and sworn in that evening.

This small piece of housekeeping is worth knowing because of what it does to the vote counts on this site. Every roll call taken on June 18, 2026 — including the adoption of Ordinance #26-1779 and the Fair Share Housing Center settlement resolution — is a 4-0 vote because the fifth seat was vacant, not because anyone was absent. By September 17, 2026 the seat had been filled by Douglas Herring, and the 4-0 votes taken that night are 4-0 for the opposite reason: Committeeman Mike Martin was absent.

Two identical tallies, two different explanations. Anywhere this site writes 4-0, it says which one applies.

Completeness is an administrative finding, not an approval: it means the application contains the documents the ordinance requires, so the board can hear it. The June 9 date itself is Patch’s reporting; what is on the record is E. Kahn’s lawyer telling the Township Committee nine days later that “the application is deemed complete.” It matters here for two reasons.

First, it was the basis of the argument that lawyer made to the Committee that night — that the by-right application had already been deemed complete, so the data-center ban could not reach it. He asked the Committee to table the ordinance, objecting both to what the ban forecloses in the future and to the ban itself as lacking a reasonable relationship to a legitimate zoning objective.

Second, nothing has happened since. The township attorney told the Committee on September 17, 2026 that the by-right application is at the Planning Board but has not been scheduled, because of the issues being worked through in the affordable housing case. The Planning Board’s own future-agenda list on June 8, 2026 did not include it either.

Before a governing body adopts a zoning amendment, the Municipal Land Use Law requires it to refer the amendment to the Planning Board, which must report back within 35 days identifying any provisions inconsistent with the master plan. The board did that in about twelve minutes. Board Attorney Karen Cayci framed the motion in two parts — find the ordinance consistent with the Master Plan, and separately recommend that the governing body add language exempting the Montgomery Township Police Department, whose own holding cells appeared to fall within the draft definition of a detention center. The vote was 9-0.

The minutes state the finding in terms: “The Board found the ordinance to be consistent with the Master Plan.”

What is fair to the developer’s side is that the finding was stated rather than argued — the discussion was about definitions and a police carve-out, not about which master plan goals a ban serves. Whether a court treats a stated finding as sufficient is an open question. The recommended police exemption did not make it into the adopted ordinance.

This is the route the township said was open to the owner all along. After the Planning Board declined to hear a general development plan — Montgomery has no ordinance authorizing GDP review — counsel told the February 2026 Planning Board that the applicant retained the right to file a site plan or seek an informal concept review. The zoning is limited manufacturing — a distinction resident Dave Leonard corrected from the floor that September, telling the Township Committee “multiple times people say light manufacturing, that’s not what the zoning is.”

It also fixes the rules the application is judged by. Under New Jersey’s time-of-application rule, an application for development is generally reviewed against the ordinances in force when it was submitted, though later ordinances relating to health and public safety can still apply. E. Kahn’s lawyer told the Township Committee in June that because the application had already been deemed complete, the data-center ban would not reach it.

As of September 17, 2026 the Planning Board had not scheduled it. The township attorney said that was because of the issues being worked through in the affordable housing case.

The plan document on the township’s website carries both dates on its cover: adopted March 9, 2026 and endorsed March 19, 2026. The reason the two dates are ten days apart is on the March 5 record — the February hearing lost to the blizzard.

With endorsement, everything Montgomery could do by itself was done: a plan adopted, an implementing ordinance rewritten, a spending plan, an administrative agent, an affirmative marketing plan, and $1.1 million appropriated to pay for the extensions the plan relies on. What remained was not in the township’s hands. The plan still needed a court, and six months later it had not had one.

The second hard date in the Round Four schedule. Having missed the February 23 hearing to a blizzard, Montgomery adopted the amended plan on March 9 and told the Planning Board the document would go to the state within 48 hours and no later than March 16.

The governing body’s endorsement could not be squeezed in before the deadline, so the township expected to ask the court for the extra days and endorsed the plan on March 19. The township attorney said on March 5 that Montgomery was far from the only municipality asking for that accommodation. Nothing in the record we have reviewed suggests the delay cost the township anything.

Township Attorney Wendy Rubinstein Quiroga’s account: Program Judge Miller had sent his recommendation to Judge Mennen, no consensus was reached with the objectors, the recommendation was to give deference to the municipality on the plan it chooses, and the next step is a fairness hearing on the new plan before an order issues. She added that the adjudicator had indicated the plan appears compliant, while noting it had only been filed in February.

The Monty News reported this stage as the dispute resolution program recommending approval and finding the plan constitutionally compliant. That framing is the newspaper’s; the township’s own minutes describe what is set out above, and no program recommendation document is posted on montgomerynj.gov.

The Committee also adopted Ordinance #26-1771 and Resolutions #26-3-100, #26-3-101 and #26-3-102 — the spending plan, the administrative agent and the affirmative marketing plan — all 5-0. The machinery moved; the case did not close.

The township itself announced, at the February 9, 2026 information session, that the Planning Board would hold the public hearing and adopt the amended plan on February 23. It did not happen that day. The meeting is listed as cancelled on the township’s Agenda Center, the March 19 Township Committee minutes record that the hearing was postponed by a blizzard, and there is no meeting video for that date because there was no meeting.

The township re-advertised with the full ten days’ notice required, which pushed the hearing two weeks. The consequence was procedural but real: because the Planning Board had not adopted the plan, the Committee could not endorse it before the March 15 filing deadline, and expected to ask the court for the extra days. The township attorney told the Committee on March 5 that Montgomery was far from the only municipality in that position.

The presentation covered the same ground as February 9: Round Four runs 2025 to 2035 with a state midpoint review in 2030; the obligation is 260 credits; the amendment meets it by extending controls on existing units rather than by zoning new inclusionary development. The planner noted the township’s Third Round plan, adopted in 2008, had been amended in 2010, 2018 and 2020 — precedent for amending a fair share plan mid-round.

Introduction of Ordinance #26-1771 passed on four ayes: Ahn, Taylor Todd, Deputy Mayor Barragan and Mayor Singh. Committeeman Martin was absent; Committeeman Ahn arrived at 7:06 p.m., before the vote. Township Attorney Wendy Rubinstein Quiroga described the ordinance as adopting the state’s model language so the statutory citations are current, not as a substantive change.

Answering Nancy Castilino, who asked the Committee to leave the existing light industrial zoning alone, the dais said nothing in the housing plan contemplates a zoning change at the site, and that any change would require an ordinance, a noticed hearing and written notice to every owner within 200 feet.

Township Administrator and Planning Director Lori Savron explained the basics first: a housing plan element sits inside the master plan, and a master plan is policy — it does not itself rezone anything. Staff then went through the credit arithmetic, development by development, against a 260-credit obligation, with bonus credits capped by the state at 25 percent of the allocation.

The amendment followed eight months of public objection, and Planning Board Chairman Dave Campeas said from the dais that the public had been heard. The township’s own stated reason, given from the podium on February 9 and again on February 19, was narrower: since the June 2025 plan was adopted, circumstances had changed to let the township extend controls on existing units instead.

Campeas, quoted by The Monty News on the amendment: “The public spoke and we listened. We came up with a different plan that hopefully … makes a lot more sense for the township.”

Staff also laid out a schedule — draft posted February 13, ordinance introduced February 19, Planning Board hearing February 23, Committee endorsement March 5 — and were clear about the limit of all of it: removing the site from the housing plan does not decide what gets built there.

Through the whole 2025 argument the buyer was under contract rather than on the deed — “equitable owners,” as Eli Kahn described it to the Planning Board in September. Former Mayor Devra Keenan had made the same point in June: the township was negotiating a housing plan around a property still titled to Johnson & Johnson.

Exactly who holds it now is itself disputed. At two public meetings, in February and again in September 2026, Skillman resident Lloyd Fernandez told officials that the deeds of record name four single-member limited liability companies rather than E. Kahn Development Corp., and that the June 2025 commitment letter came from 199 Grandview Partners LLC. The township attorney said in September 2026 that the site “is solely owned now by” E. Kahn Development. We have not examined the deeds ourselves, and we report the disagreement rather than resolve it.

The session was held by Zoom shortly after the November 13 meeting, with the parties in separate breakout rooms and the substance confidential. What the township attorney reported publicly on December 4 is that Montgomery had written to the program and to all interested parties saying it would amend its plan.

The reason was a verbal, unexecuted agreement in principle with the owner of Pike Run to extend affordability controls on at least 96 rental units. Ninety-six, she said, “does get us to the full plan” — which is why no other development needed to stay in it. The full plan also counted the 54 ownership-unit extensions the Committee had approved on November 13 and additional senior rentals at McKinley Court.

The same owner had been approached in 2025 and, staff told the Planning Board on June 23, “were not able to agree to extend the controls.” By November 13 that had already changed: the attorney told the Committee there was an agreement in principle with the owner of Pike Run, and the mayor described the earlier difficulty in the past tense. Why the owner’s position changed is not stated anywhere in the public record, and this site will not guess at it.

She also set out the posture of the case, and it is worth keeping straight. Fair Share Housing Center had not objected to Montgomery’s plan. Two citizen groups objected to the inclusion of the Kenvue site. The site’s purchaser objected to those objections. No party had yet been declared right or wrong about anything.

This is where the alternative to building on the Kenvue site stopped being an idea and became a budget line. Ordinance #25-1766 appropriated $1,100,000 — $650,000 from the township’s COAH (affordable housing) trust fund plus authorization to issue $450,000 in bonds or notes — to fund payments to owners of deed-restricted homes whose affordability controls were expiring.

Resolutions #25-11-374 and #25-11-375 extended controls at Montgomery Hills (McKinley Court) and Montgomery Glen: 35 and 19 owner-occupied units. The mechanics matter for anyone who owns one. Controls are extended under the township’s existing right in the original deed restriction whether or not an owner opts in; opting in is what earns the additional $10,000 the bond pays for.

Resolution #25-11-376, “Ratifying Settlement Agreement,” was adopted with a short explanation that it memorialized in open session terms discussed in closed session. Which case it settled was never stated when the vote was taken.

The election came four months into the argument over the Kenvue site, and it did not change the Committee. The Monty News reported that registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in Montgomery roughly two to one, and that it had been nearly nine years since township voters elected a Republican.

The membership did change later, and not at the ballot box. Vincent Barragan resigned from the Committee effective June 18, 2026; Patricia Taylor Todd was elected Deputy Mayor that night. By September 2026 the Committee was Mayor Neena Singh, Deputy Mayor Taylor Todd, Dennis Ahn, Mike Martin and Douglas Herring.

The steps that took the Kenvue site out of the housing plan fall in the weeks after this election: a bond ordinance introduced nine days later and adopted in December, the first mediation session on November 14, and an amended plan the Planning Board adopted in March 2026. The same five members did all of it. That is the order the events came in; nothing on the public record says the election produced them, and this site does not claim it did.

This entry exists because of what it says about September 2026. The Township Committee’s order for a redevelopment study of the Kenvue site looks like a first for Montgomery. It is not.

Township Administrator and Planning Director Lori Savron told the Planning Board on February 9, 2026 — and repeated it to the Township Committee ten days later — that in October 2025 the Committee had already authorized and directed the same Planning Board to conduct a preliminary investigation into whether 23 Orchard Road meets the criteria for designation as a non-condemnation redevelopment area, with the board expected to review the completed study around March 2026. Same statute, same kind of resolution, same absence of eminent-domain power.

23 Orchard Road is the site the June 2025 housing plan had carried at 180 units, 36 of them affordable, and which the 2026 amendment also removed. A redevelopment designation is a tool Montgomery uses; whether the criteria are met on any particular property is a separate question, and it is the question the Kenvue study now has to answer.

A general development plan is a New Jersey mechanism for approving a large project in phases. Counsel later explained why developers like them: a GDP requires less documentation than a site plan and, in towns that have adopted the enabling ordinance, can shield a project from later zoning changes for years.

Montgomery has no such ordinance, and therefore no standards to review a GDP against. Adopting one is not mandatory. On counsel’s advice the Planning Board declined to hear the application, telling the owner it remained free to file an ordinary site plan or to bring an informal concept plan for feedback.

E. Kahn sued the Planning Board over the refusal. At the February 9, 2026 meeting counsel said the township had not yet been served; the case was still live in June 2026, when the board went into closed session on it. One resident called the dispute unnecessary confrontation; the board’s position was that it was a technical legal limit, not a choice.

Chairman Dave Campeas opened by setting limits: no formal submission, no township professionals to review anything presented, no board opinion on the merits. Eli Kahn introduced himself and partner Matt Adams as “equitable owners” — under contract, not yet closed — and said they had bought the campus for its industrial zoning, not to build housing.

Adams compared four scenarios: roughly 1.6 million square feet of flex light-manufacturing space plus 13 residential lots built by right over 10 to 15 years; a mixed-use plan; a 617-unit all-residential concept; and the township’s 417-unit plan. The by-right figures given that night were 402 truck trips and more than 8,000 total trips per 24 hours at full build-out — the developer put the car share at roughly 7,600, and the same traffic memo had been read into the record in June 2025 as 7,820 car trips — and impervious cover rising from about 36 acres to about 102. The trip counts, truck counts and impervious-cover figures were all the developer’s own, from consultants it hired — Kahn said so himself, “we didn’t come up with these numbers, we used consultants” — and residents called the report cherry-picked and designed to scare them.

That is the September 2025 concept, and it should never be quoted as if it were the current one. At an informal neighbours’ meeting that November, reported in February 2026, the developer was presenting a smaller by-right scheme — roughly 1.2 million square feet plus 9 single-family homes, with 300 to 400 truck trips a day. Two different concepts, two months apart, on the same parcel.

Two things from that night mattered later. The developer flagged a coming tax appeal, saying the property is over-assessed. And asked what happens if the township meets its obligation another way, the answer was that it would fight to stay in the plan — and failing that, build some version of the industrial project.

The fight in June had been at the Planning Board, which adopts the housing plan. This was the first time the governing body heard it at length.

Edward Silverman argued the adopted plan rested on two findings he considered false: that no architecturally important building would be affected, and that the site is underutilized. Shellie Jacobson, a Grandview Road resident since 1978, pointed to the two-lane bridges on Grandview and asked members to drive the road themselves. Dave Leonard asked for a written alternative plan within thirty days.

From the dais, officials corrected the figure residents kept repeating: the township’s entire Round Four obligation is 260 units, not 250 low-income units on one site, and 70 affordable units were proposed at Grandview Road. Counsel explained that towns that put forward a lower number mostly moved it by six to ten units, and that the window to challenge comes only once every ten years; one committee member added that filing a challenge would have cost Montgomery its immunity. A member called the plan a living document — “always part of a master plan,” and subject to change.

This date explains most of what happened in June 2025, and it deserves to be stated fairly. The 2024 legislation replaced the old COAH process with a schedule of deadlines, each of which a municipality must hit to keep its protection from builder’s-remedy litigation — the suits in which a developer asks a court to approve a project a town’s own zoning does not allow. Towns that lose that protection can effectively lose control of their planning.

Montgomery’s professionals told the Planning Board that putting a ten-year plan together in ninety days was, in their words, extremely unheard of, and the resolution adopting the plan records the Board’s objection to the “unfair timeline” the state had imposed on municipalities. Round Four itself runs from 2025 to 2035, with a state midpoint review in 2030.

Headline News Montgomery dates the legal notice to June 12, 2025. The township’s own account at the June 23 hearing was that the plan went up on the township website on June 13, the day after the legal notice ran in the Courier News — ten days before residents would be asked to comment on it.

That gap became the first grievance of the whole dispute. Residents said the legal ads in a county paper few of them read reached almost no one, and pressed on whether anyone living near the proposed sites had been mailed notice — the answer was that mailed notice comes later, when a builder files. The township’s answer was accurate as far as it went: for a master plan hearing state law requires publication in a designated newspaper plus service on neighbouring clerks and the county, which the clerk said had been done, and the 200-foot mailed notice residents expected attaches to zoning changes and site plan applications, not to adoption of a housing element.

Under the 2024 law that replaced the Council on Affordable Housing, a municipality that wants protection from builder’s-remedy litigation files a declaratory judgment action and joins the Affordable Housing Dispute Resolution Program. Montgomery did both on January 29, 2025, two days after the Township Committee accepted its numbers by Resolution 25-1-54. The case is Docket No. SOM-L-153-25, and it is the case everything since has run through — the one named, meeting after meeting, in the Township Committee’s executive-session resolutions on affordable housing from February 2026 onward.

The order setting the obligations followed. Every plan, hearing and settlement described further down this timeline is measured against the two figures it fixed: 73 units of present need, meaning rehabilitation of existing substandard housing, and 260 units of prospective need for 2025 through 2035.

Two township records date the order slightly differently. The recitals of Resolution #26-6-194, adopted June 18, 2026, give March 27, 2025; the recitals of Resolution #26-3-113, adopted March 19, 2026, give March 26. We use March 27, the date given in the later of the two recitals, and note the discrepancy rather than hide it.

The campus at 199 Grandview Road had been a Johnson & Johnson research and headquarters property. Residents told the Township Committee on July 17, 2025 that its late-modern office building was designed by Henry N. Cobb and W. Steven Wood of I.M. Pei & Partners with oversight by Pei himself — an attribution the township’s own 2025 housing plan did not acknowledge, having stated that there are “no historic or architecturally important sites or buildings on the property.” That plan puts the site at 382.771 acres, comprising Block 14001 Lot 2 and Block 13001 Lot 15; the Limited Manufacturing core that holds the buildings is about 257 acres. Reading the assessor’s records aloud at the June 23, 2025 Planning Board hearing, former Mayor Devra Keenan put about 160 of those acres in the commercial (class 4B) assessment, at a net value of roughly $41 million, with a further 97 acres nearby carried as farm-qualified. For years the site was one of the township’s largest taxpayers.

The relocation itself was disclosed in a 2023 SEC filing. What 2024 held was the wind-down: 51 layoffs filed under the WARN Act in February, and a long-term lease on a Summit campus beginning in 2025. When Kenvue said it was leaving, a large, well-serviced industrial property — with its last employees due out by 2026 — became the obvious candidate for several different questions: where Montgomery could put state-mandated affordable housing, what a developer could build by right, and what the township could afford to lose from its tax base. Those three questions have been argued over ever since.