"Well, it is official," Paramus Mayor Chris DiPiazza wrote on Facebook in August 2024, announcing that Costco Wholesale had filed plans for the long-vacant Kmart and Stop & Shop site on Route 17 South. Two years, at least six planning board postponements, and one dismissed lawsuit later, "official" turned out to mean something closer to "the paperwork has started."
As of this month, the project has cleared every legal and procedural obstacle that once made its outcome genuinely uncertain. What actually cleared them had less to do with the traffic testimony and courtroom arguments that generated headlines along the way, and more to do with two decisions that nobody in the packed council chambers was debating in real time.
A Decade of Empty Parking Lots
Kmart closed at the site in December 2014. Stop & Shop, next door, followed in January 2022, leaving three adjoining addresses, 857, 859 and 861 Route 17 South, sitting vacant along a stretch of highway that also feeds traffic toward Garden State Plaza and Paramus Park. Paramus already anchors four shopping malls and two of the region's busiest retail corridors, Routes 4 and 17, and BJ's Wholesale Club already operates in the borough. A second warehouse club a few miles down the same road was, by 2024, an obvious use for a parcel whose retail footprint had gone dark twice in a decade.
Eight Months of Hearings and a Resolution From 1972
Costco first appeared before the Paramus Planning Board on October 3, 2024, represented by attorney Jennifer Mazawey of K&L Gates. The application, covering a 184,000-square-foot warehouse with no gas station, went through repeated adjournments, carried from January 2025 to May, then to July 17, then finally heard on August 7, 2025. At an earlier session, resident Timothy Kennedy told the board that a 1972 borough resolution barred new construction along the edges of the property, a detail that surfaces only in the meeting minutes, not in any press release. The board asked him to raise it formally when Costco's team presented in the summer.
The board voted on October 2, 2025. All nine members approved the application after public comment that ran mostly toward traffic. Steve Wolf, of Kramer Drive, testified that Route 17 already crawls from noon until 6:30 or 7 p.m. every day except Sunday. A consultant working for Costco had estimated roughly 100 additional vehicle trips during peak hours, a figure he called conservative since it drew partly from Costco locations that also operate gas stations. Paramus's location will not have one.
The Argument That Actually Won
The traffic numbers dominated public comment, but the argument that moved the board came from planner Matt Flynn, representing the applicant. He described the existing site, three separate addresses with a sprawling, scattered building footprint, as a "very large, underutilized property." Concentrating that footprint into a single structure, he told the board, actually pulls the building mass away from many of the neighboring homes rather than toward them. Costco agreed to add an eight-foot buffer fence along the slope facing residential lots, along with new tree plantings.
That consolidation argument, not the traffic estimate, is what the approval turned on. A single big box replacing three defunct, scattered structures reads as a bigger building on paper. On this particular parcel it meant less construction touching the residential edge, not more.
The Lawsuit That Actually Threatened the Project
Approval was not the end of it. In January 2026, Clauss Avenue resident David Lorenzo sued the Paramus Planning Board and Costco in Superior Court, arguing that neighboring property owners had not been properly notified of the hearings and that the board never adequately analyzed potential harm to the surrounding neighborhood before granting the site variances. Had the suit succeeded, the approval would have been voided, forcing Costco to reapply and restart public hearings from the beginning. For a stretch of early 2026, attorneys for the borough and for Costco declined to comment on the pending case, and the project's timeline sat in genuine limbo.
A Superior Court judge dismissed the case on April 13, 2026. Lorenzo requested reconsideration, and the borough and Costco asked the court to make him cover attorney fees. Neither the appeal nor the fee request has changed the underlying outcome. The approval stands.
What Actually Changed in September
On September 11, 2026, Costco submitted its permitting paperwork to the Paramus Building Department. Mayor DiPiazza confirmed the department is reviewing the submission before permits are issued, the last procedural step before construction can begin. No demolition date, construction start, or opening timeline has been announced.
It is worth measuring how far off the original estimate now sits. When the mayor first announced the application in August 2024, he projected completion by spring 2026. That date has already passed, no demolition crew has touched the site, and the permits themselves are still under review. The delay traces less to the lawsuit, which added a few months of uncertainty before its April dismissal, and more to the ordinary length of a major site plan review that took a full year just to reach a vote.
A quick recap of how the dates actually line up:
- October 3, 2024: Costco's application first reaches the Planning Board
- October 2, 2025: Unanimous approval for a 184,000-square-foot store
- January 2026: A neighboring resident files suit over notice and harm review
- April 13, 2026: Superior Court dismisses the suit
- September 11, 2026: Costco files for building permits
The loudest parts of this project, the packed hearing room, the online arguments over Route 17 traffic, the lawsuit's brief run through Superior Court, never actually changed the outcome. A planner's argument about where a building's mass sits relative to a residential lot line did. So did a judge's reading of New Jersey's notice requirements. Anyone on this stretch of Route 17 who wants the next real update should watch the Building Department's permit queue, not the planning board's calendar. That is where this project actually lives now.
If the corridor's next chapter has you wondering what a project like this means for a specific address nearby, Christian Di Stasio Group tracks these Bergen County corridor stories as closely as the market data and is glad to talk through what it means for your own street.
