Cherry Hill zoning board rejects proposal to construct a senior living complex at the Holly Ravine Farm property

More than 10 hours of hearings on a controversial plan for a long-gone but beloved Cherry Hill farm site ended early Thursday with a unanimous “no” vote by the township zoning board.

Texas-based Caddis Healthcare Real Estate was seeking land use and building height variances to construct a 175-unit senior living complex on the 23-acre Holly Ravine Farm property near the complicated intersection of Evesham and Springdale Roads.

Caddis representatives testified that additional traffic and other potential impacts of the proposed 220-bed facility and its 100 employees would be negligible, but board members were not convinced the complex would benefit Cherry Hill.

“There two serious concerns for me: traffic safety and the uncertainty of adequate sanitary sewage capacity,” said acting board chairman Daniel DiRenzo Jr.

“I must vote no because the negatives outweigh the positives,” he said, citing the plan’s lack of provisions for new traffic signals at two access roads to the new facility as “a deadly safety issue.”

Eric Ascalon, a longtime township resident who organized grassroots opposition to the proposed development, made a statement on Facebook’s Save Holly Ravine Farm page shortly after the vote at 12:45 a.m. Thursday.

“While I am pleased to see this, and while I believe this is a win for the community, it’s our turn to fulfill our end of the bargain,” he said in the post.

Ascalon, a former land use lawyer, said residents should demand that the township and county come up enough money to buy the property and preserve it as open space.

“We must reach out to our … elected officials and demand that they make it a priority to come up with the Green Acres and other funding necessary to offer the owners a fair market value for the farm’s preservation for open space, passive recreation, or agricultural use,” Ascalon wrote.

“We’d love to see the property preserved as open space,” Cherry Hill council president and mayoral candidate David Fleisher said Thursday. “I look forward to sitting down in good faith with the owners to discuss ways to protect the property.”

Holly Ravine has been owned the Gilmour family for a century. Family members could not be reached for comment after the meeting.

Nor could Richard Goldstein, the Cherry Hill land use lawyer who represented the owners before the zoning board.

During the meeting, family member Kathy Ripple-Gilmour told the zoning board that her family “diligently tried for decades” to make the farm available for preservation, to no avail. The proposed senior complex “would be beautiful and would preserve the memory of the farm” with displays of photographs and artifacts, she said.

John Gilmour, a dairy farmer who later became mayor, helped steer the township through its exponential growth years in the 1960s and ‘70s. One of dozens of farms that once dotted the landscape of the township, Holly Ravine is fondly remembered by older local residents for its Cowtail Bar ice cream parlor and outdoor “Moo Zoo,” where kids got a chance to pet farm animals.