July 24, 2013 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • Page 9 Midland Park Board approves shopping center parking lot upgrades The owners of the Midland Park Shopping Center will be making several aesthetic and safety enhancements to their parking lot, but they won’t be able to relocate their garbage dumpsters, at least not yet. The Midland Park Planning Board last week approved Midpark Hye Partners’s application for the paving and landscaping improvements but balked at allowing three compactors for refuse and cardboard disposal to be placed at the rear of the building behind Starbucks and Pizzaiolo. Attorney Joseph Basralian asked that the non-controversial components of the application be approved so that the mill- ing and paving work can be done in August when traffic and parking are the lightest at the shopping center and will be the least disruptive to shoppers and tenants. Plans call for replacing the curb and sidewalk along Godwin Avenue to match the work on the Goffle Road side completed in 2004-5 and in conformance with the borough’s streetscape ordinance. Five decorative lamp posts will also be installed. The landscaped strip along the sidewalk will be widened, and plantings will be added. The aisles in the northwest area of the lot will be nar- rowed to 21 feet, and the lot will be restriped for angle park- ing to reinforce the one-way traffic pattern, Basralian said. Directional arrows will be ground into the pavement at the suggestion of Police Chief Michael Marra. At the rear of the shopping center, a landscaped strip will be planted along the brook, the loose curb stops there will be replaced with permanent curbing and the fence will be replaced. The main parking lot between Kings and Pizzaiolo will be milled, resurfaced and restriped. The original application included vacating the refuse area at the south end of the lot and changing the traffic pat- tern in the area off Goffle Road through restriping to facili- tate traffic circulation to the lower parking lot. Board members expressed concern that in the proposed location behind Starbucks, servicing the refuse compactors would have to be done from the main travel aisle around the building. The current site is on a secondary aisle in a corner of the property. “You’re talking about a roll of f 28-ft. long which has to be attached and reattached to a truck. You’d be encroaching into the flow of traffic when you are pulling it out,” said board member Mark Braunius. “I am concerned about blocking access from Goffle Road and traffic backing up there,” said Councilwoman Polling place changed for special election Voting District 5 voters in Midland Park will have to report to a different venue to vote in the primary election for US Senate next month. The special election, triggered by the death of US Senator Frank Lautenberg in June, is scheduled for Tuesday, Aug. 13. For that election only, voting will be moved from O’Connell Hall at the Church of the Nativity to the Mid- land Park Firehouse on Witte Drive. The polls will be open from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. The firehouse already serves as the polling place for Districts 1, 2 and 4. Borough Clerk/Administrator Addie Hanna said she received approval for the change from county officials last week. She said no inspection was necessary, and no changes needed because the site is already used as a polling place. The move was forced by a conflict with the use of the hall, which had been previously rented, since the election was unanticipated. Hanna said there should be no problem in having the (continued on page 17) Nancy Peet, a board member. Engineer Andrew Missey said with the compactors, garbage removal frequency would decrease to two or three times a week. Cardboard pick ups would be even less fre- quent, perhaps once a week, he said. Braunius asked why the dumpsters were being relocated at all. Missey said the current location is more remote from the building and thus not used as much as it could be. He said with the closing of the video store, internal corridors had been relocated to make the proposed refuse area more convenient for the tenants. Missey also said the slope at the southern end of the property is not appropriate for the pro- posed compactors. Midpark Hye will submit an amended application at a later date for the board to address the dumpster and parking changes in this area.