Proposal Would Add 228,000 SF of Office Space

BRIDGEWATER, NJ-WP Commercial, based in Chatham, NJ, wants to expand an existing office building here and add two additional smaller buildings, but the developer’s proposal raised a number of issues at an acrimonious planning board meeting recently in this Somerset County township of 45,000 people. Action on the proposal has been put off until at least next month.

What WP Commercial wants to do is expand the existing but vacant former Olivetti regional operations building at the intersection of Route 202 and Milltown Road here, adding a second floor and a total of 104,000 sf to the 233,000-sf asset, bringing it to about 337,000 sf. The company’s proposal also calls for adding the two smaller buildings of about 62,000 sf each, creating a three-building office complex of just over 460,000 sf.

In terms of the project’s size, it comes at a time when the Somerset County office market is one of the softest in the state, although the county, located in Central New Jersey, had exhibited a pattern of explosive growth prior to the recent downturn. For their part, opponents of the project recently cited potential traffic and the impact of a new entrance on Milltown Rd.