APP: Russell K. Corby stands in the parking lot of the old Jamesway discount department store along Route 9 and sees a lot of bad. The storefront is boarded up, as it’s been since the once-popular retailer left more than a decade ago. The parking lot is dotted with overgrown grass, weeds and the debris left behind by the public, including the vagrants and homeless men who live in the nearby woods.

Yet Corby sees hope here, too.

“This is the first thing you see when you’re coming into Lakewood from the north,” said Corby, executive director of the Lakewood Development Corp.

For now, the run-down site at the boundary with Howell isn’t much to see, but future plans could transform it from vacant land to a small business incubator and federally-funded health and dental clinic.

But there’s a long way to go between here and there.

Corby hopes to get a report back soon from a consulting firm that is studying the Jamesway site and the surrounding area, a roughly 18-acre tract bounded by Route 9, Kennedy Boulevard, Clifton Avenue and the Metedeconk River.

The report is expected to “offer alternative planning strategies and recommend beautification and landscape concepts for the subject site,” according to a letter from Stearns Associates LLC, the Hunterdon County firm preparing the report. The company was hired for about $35,000.

Corby, whose office is charged with spurring economic development in the township, said the review is more than for just the redevelopment of the Jamesway property. However, he does not want to speculate on what the report will say, because he wants to avoid preconceived notions about the project.

“We don’t know the answers,” Corby said while touring the site earlier this week. “To focus on one rehabilitation project and ignore the larger area, when we have the opportunity to do so, doesn’t make any sense.”

Although Corby is hopeful, the report already has detractors.

Lynn Celli, an outspoken member of the LDC board of trustees, said she opposes using public money to review options for private redevelopment. She said the Jamesway building’s owner, Beth Medrash Govoha, a downtown rabbinical college, has owned the property for six years and has let it deteriorate in that time.

Property records show BMG, as the school is known, bought its 6.6-acre parcel on Route 9 for $1.9 million in 2000.

“You don’t reward a child who is misbehaving,” Celli said. “So why should we give to people who are allowing properties to deteriorate? Why should you rewared them with free money at the taxpayers’ expense?”

Corby disagreed, saying the township can work with a private owner to help redevelop the property. He emphasized that the study the LDC paid for is to give the township options, not committing the town to funding a private redevelopment project.

“It is not unusual to form these public-private partnerships to work in a redevelopment area,” Corby said. “If we were simply to say, “There should be no public involvement,’ it would be safe to say you could stop all Brownfields programs in the United States.”

Brownfields programs are designed to redevelop potentially polluted properties.

Chanie Jacobowitz, director of governmental affairs for BMG, said in an e-mail that a partnership between the township and BMG would help upgrade a gateway area of Lakewood.

“Hospitals, universities and nonprofits usually make good partners with municipalities because they have a common focus on a common good,” Jacobowitz wrote.

Corby noted that the LDC has not acted on BMG’s initial proposal, an ambitious plan pitched last October by Jacobowitz. The proposal, according to LDC records, sought more than $400,000 from the LDC to revamp the Jamesway building and parking lot and start a business incubator with 10 start-up firms.

Jacobowitz said BMG understands options must first be reviewed before the LDC acts on the proposal.

“Collaborative efforts work best by moving in steps,” she wrote. “Thinking before acting is good.”