An Ocean County Superior Court judge has dismissed a lawsuit challenging the Jackson Township Planning Board’s approval of a proposed yeshiva and dormitory campus on Frank Applegate Road, affirming the board’s decision in full, TLS has learned.

In a 19-page decision issued October 20 following a prerogative writs trial held in August, Assignment Judge Francis R. Hodgson Jr. dismissed the action brought by Jackson resident Chris Podolsky “with prejudice,” leaving in place Resolution No. 2026-01, the board’s approval of Applegate Owner, LLC’s project, and ordering each side to bear its own costs and fees.

The planning board approved the application by a 7-1 vote at its November 17, 2025 hearing. The project calls for a two-story, approximately 50,600-square-foot institutional building containing a private high school, a post-high-school educational institution and dormitory accommodations, along with a dining area, gymnasium space and parking, on roughly 24.5 acres of vacant, wooded land identified as Block 4404, Lots 1 and 3 on Frank Applegate Road.

Podolsky, a Crow Hill Road resident who represented himself, raised eight challenges to the approval, arguing among other things that the application was incomplete because the state Department of Environmental Protection had not yet issued a final wetlands Letter of Interpretation at the time of the hearing, that the board improperly deferred environmental, septic and stormwater issues to outside agencies, that the project was approved without sufficient proof of basic septic and stormwater feasibility, that the board failed to meaningfully consider the Environmental Commission’s concerns, and that the public notice was defective.

Hodgson rejected each argument. He found the board was entitled to deem the application complete upon proof that the DEP submission had been filed, noting the Municipal Land Use Law expressly permits local approvals conditioned on subsequent action by other governmental agencies. He further found that the applicant’s preliminary septic design work and defined stormwater concept, together with conditions requiring any material redesign to return to the board, provided a sufficient evidentiary basis for approval, and that the board’s memorializing resolution, read together with the hearing transcript, contained adequate findings.

While the judge noted that certain statements made by the board’s attorney during the hearing regarding the DEP’s role “were broader than necessary,” he concluded the record reflected “a lengthy hearing with extensive public participation” and that the board’s decision-making process was neither unlawful nor fundamentally unfair. Among the conditions the board imposed or secured were the addition of a second resident adviser and a prohibition against use of the property as a banquet hall, assembly hall, or comparable social venue.

The judge did construe the approval to require Applegate Owner to return to the planning board if any outside agency requires a material change to the approved building location, site access, circulation pattern, septic-field location, stormwater design, environmental buffers, limits of disturbance, or any other substantive feature of the development.

The DEP has since issued a Freshwater Wetlands Letter of Interpretation for the property on January 23, 2026, and determined on March 23, 2026 that no flood hazard area permit was required because the proposed development is not located within 300 feet of the top of bank of the regulated water.

As first reported by TLS, Judge Hodgson in February denied Podolsky’s bid for temporary restraints seeking to halt the approval pending completion of the DEP’s environmental review, ruling that the application was premature and that the plaintiff retained an adequate legal remedy through a traditional prerogative writ challenge, the very action the court has now dismissed.