I spend my working life reading specifications, tracing decisions back to their source, and trying to make complicated systems understandable. A while ago I realized the same skills could be useful much closer to home.
Save Montgomery is a grassroots group of Montgomery Township, New Jersey residents, and I maintain its website, savemontgomery.org. This post explains what the site is, why it is built the way it is, and how you can help.
What Save Montgomery Is About
The group came together over a 2025 housing plan decision about the former Kenvue campus at 199 Grandview Road: roughly 383 acres that Kenvue (the consumer health company spun off from Johnson & Johnson) is expected to stop operating by the end of 2026. What happens to that land will shape traffic, schools, taxes and open space in Montgomery for decades.
Save Montgomery is clear about where it stands. It is not opposed to affordable housing. It opposes high-density development on the Kenvue site and opposes designating the site an “area in need of redevelopment.” Since then, the site has grown to follow other township decisions issue by issue.
The Issues the Site Tracks Today
Here is a short tour of the main topics, each with a plain-language explainer on the site:
- The Kenvue campus. The township’s amended Fourth Round housing plan, adopted March 9, 2026, removes the Kenvue site. The plan is not yet court-certified, so the site explains what that change does and does not settle.
- The redevelopment study. On September 17, 2026, the Township Committee voted 4-0 to send part of the campus to the Planning Board for a “non-condemnation” redevelopment investigation. The explainer covers what that designation is under New Jersey law, what “non-condemnation” means (no eminent domain), and why a designation alone builds nothing.
- The data center ban and lawsuit. The township banned data centers and detention centers in June 2026, and the campus developer sued in July. The site notes that the complaint names no dollar amount, despite a widely repeated $300 million figure.
- Taxes and PILOTs. PILOT stands for Payment in Lieu of Taxes, a tool often paired with redevelopment. The mayor has estimated a gap of about $1.4 million a year in tax revenue once Kenvue leaves.
- Everyday quality-of-life issues: flooding and stormwater, traffic and mobility, deer management, wastewater consolidation and farmland preservation.
The full list lives on the issues page, and every explainer is collected under articles.
Built Like Good Engineering Documentation
The part I care about most is how the site works, because it borrows the habits that make technical documentation trustworthy:
- Primary sources first. Factual claims point to township records (agendas, minutes, resolutions and ordinances) or to the township’s own meeting video, sometimes linked to the exact segment. When the site relies on a news report, a court filing or someone’s statement, it says so.
- Documents you can read yourself. The documents library hosts the source files, including the full housing plans, which run to hundreds of pages, so nobody has to take a summary on faith.
- A change log for the town. The timeline records each decision with its date and source, the way a good changelog records each release.
- Meetings with links to the record. The meetings page lists upcoming Township Committee and Planning Board sessions and links past ones to their video.
- Corrections are welcome. If a source is unclear or something is wrong, readers are asked to say so, and it gets fixed. Being accurate matters more than being loud.
Local government runs on documents that are public but hard to find and harder to read. Making them easy to find, link to and check is a small thing that I think makes a real difference.
The 2026 Election: Information, Not Endorsements
Two Township Committee seats are on the ballot on Tuesday, November 3, 2026, and early in-person voting runs October 24 through November 1. The Election 2026 page brings together what the candidates have said on land use, the Kenvue site, data centers and housing, with links to their full responses, plus how and where to vote.
The page does not endorse or rank anyone. Its job is to help you find the candidates’ own words and make up your own mind.
How You Can Get Involved
None of this works without neighbors who show up. If you live in Montgomery, or care about how towns make land-use decisions, here are a few ways to help:
- Vote. Check the voting guide for dates, mail-in deadlines and polling places.
- Get email updates. Sign up for the newsletter to hear about agendas and hearings before they happen.
- Attend a meeting. Watch the meetings calendar. When you speak at public comment, cite specific items and sources. Accurate comments carry more weight.
- Volunteer. Volunteers attend meetings and take notes, summarize documents, check facts and keep neighbors informed. If you are good at reading long documents, you are exactly who we need.
- Join the conversation. The Save Montgomery Facebook group is the group’s community space.
- Share it. Send savemontgomery.org to a neighbor who has been asking, “What is going on with the Kenvue site?”
Get in Touch
- Website: savemontgomery.org
- About the group: savemontgomery.org/about
- Email (questions and corrections): info@savemontgomery.org
- Facebook group: Save Montgomery
Those two channels, the email and the Facebook group, are the only ones the group runs. If you see something on the site that looks wrong, please write in. That is exactly how it is supposed to work.