FRiENdS OF hOllaNd hIghlaNdS

130 ShiRE ROaD, MilFORD, N.j. 08848  (  908.995.2536, FacSiMilE 0478

hollandhighlands@netcarrier.com  n www.hollandhighlands.org

 

 

October 23, 2007

 

Mr. Benjamin L. Spinelli

Executive Director

Office of Smart Growth

P.O. Box 204

Trenton, NJ 08635-0204

 

Re:      Holland Township Petition for Initial Plan Endorsement

            Consistency Review Letter

 

Mr. Spinelli:

 

Thank you for posting your October 4, 2007 letter to Mayor Bernard O’Brien online so that citizens in Holland can be kept informed about the Plan Endorsement process.  Our group is composed of about 150 Holland residents who are focused on protecting the rural environment in our community, so we have tried to be actively involved with Plan Endorsement.

 

We congratulate you and your office for getting so many things right in your letter, especially the focus on the large gap between the words in Holland’s Master Plan and the Petition and the development regulations, zoning and other ordinances actually adopted by the township. 

 

However, there is one area in which your letter seems to make a false assumption, so I want to call this matter to your attention – as well as suggest a possible remedy.  In your first paragraph, you salute the work of Holland’s “governing body, planning board, citizen volunteers, and the township’s consultants.”  Only three of the four groups cited were substantively involved with developing Holland’s Petition for Plan Endorsement.

 

In Holland, there were no “citizen volunteers” serving on “a committee to prepare the initial petition on behalf of the governing body,” as recommended in your Guidelines for Plan Endorsement.  However, there was a large group of what might be called “citizen interveners” who had to force themselves in at the end of the Petition process.  Holland officials chose not to form a citizens committee, despite having sufficient time to employ this process after learning that Plan Endorsement and center designation were required by COAH when Holland’s second round plan received substantive certification in December 2004.

 

Instead of using 2005 for community visioning, Holland officials decided to have the Petition developed entirely in secret by a small group of elected and appointed officials working with the township’s planner.  Moreover, every indication is that this small clique would have preferred to keep things secret and lock the public out of the development of a vision for their own community.

 

That’s a serious charge, so I offer evidence.  I and other members of our group attend every meeting of the planning board and Township Committee in Holland.  Therefore, I’m sure that the work on the Petition for Plan Endorsement was never discussed in public until the time for the required public hearing arrived.  I recall vividly that I saw a small legal notice in the local newspaper on February 2, 2006, announcing a February 13 hearing on something called a Petition for Plan Endorsement.  I had to call the planning board secretary to ask what this was about, so I’m certain that there was never any public mention of work on the Petition prior to the publication of this one-inch notice.

 

That mysterious and tiny legal notice would have brought no significant public attendance at the first hearing.  Fortunately, the February hearing was postponed to March 13, 2006 because the draft Petition was not completed.  During that month, we educated ourselves on what Plan Endorsement was about, and then our group informed citizens of the import and impact of the Petition and let them know that according to the State Plan, the proposed Village Center is an area that “has (or is planned for) . . . a minimum gross housing density of three dwelling units per acre.”  We wrote letters to the editor.  People within the proposed Center boundaries walked their neighborhoods and informed residents. 

As a result, there was an overflow crowd for the March 13 hearing.  This turnout was entirely the result of efforts by the citizens, with the township merely placing the same cryptic one-inch legal notice in the local paper on March 2, 2006.  Holland’s Petition claims that the township chose to employ public hearings rather than the recommended petition committee.  Let me be clear:  there would have been no one at these hearings if the township’s meager efforts were the only means to involve the public.

Following the March 13, 2006 hearing, planning board chairman Peter Craig phoned me and said he was forming a subcommittee to work on Plan Endorsement, and he invited me and my wife to be members.  He also asked me to submit names of others who could contribute to the subcommittee’s work. 

 

At the April 10, 2006 meeting of the Holland planning board, I was surprised to hear that the subcommittee would be meeting on April 25, and that only four members of the planning board were mentioned as members.  (The board also discussed whether they needed to publish a notice about this April 25 meeting and decided they would not.)  When I sent Mr. Craig an email asking if some of the folks I’d recommended were on the subcommittee, he replied, “The original idea of including interested and informed folks as members of a Plan Endorsement Subcommittee is one that didn't work out, Michael.”  It

 

appeared to me that the elected officials who appointed Mr. Craig didn’t welcome his idea of bringing members of the public into the process.

 

Shortly after the March hearing, our group posted the draft Petition and maps of the proposed Village Center on our Web site at www.hollandhighlands.org, along with links to the State Plan, the criteria for a Village Center, the Guidelines for Plan Endorsement and other relevant materials (which are still there for your perusal).  We encouraged people to inform themselves.  This was done because the township only made the Petition and maps available for examination during the clerk’s office hours, when most residents are at work, and they were charging people more than 10 dollars to walk away with a copy.  

 

At the subcommittee meeting on April 25, 2006 (attended by Barry Ableman and Courtney Mercer of OSG), township insiders showed an uncooperative attitude toward the public, who once again filled the room.  The meeting began with township planner Elizabeth McKenzie charging that citizens had been spreading misinformation about the size of the proposed Village Center by claiming it was 1.5 square miles when actually it was about one square mile.  We pointed out that the draft Petition gave no size for the Center, so we had relied upon a February 22, 2005 memo from the Holland Township Cross Acceptance Committee to the Hunterdon County Planning Board concerning the Village Center, where it said on page 2, “Its total land area is about 1.5 square miles.”  So, the public was accused of spreading misinformation for which the township itself was the source.

 

Later in that meeting, as a landowner asked a question, planning board member and Township Committeeman Ed Burdzy wrote “NIMBY Not in my backyard” on the white board behind the subcommittee.  Many people found this insulting, implying that mere selfishness motivated anyone attending because their property was within the boundaries of the proposed center.  (I and many others at the meeting, as well as all the township officials, don’t live within the boundaries of the large Village Center proposed at that time.) 

 

Things got even stranger at the final public hearing on June 29, 2006.  Members of the public were required to swear an oath that they would tell “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”  Most just wanted to ask questions.  An armed Holland police officer appeared at the back of the meeting room. 

 

I’ve gone on at length with these details because I need to convey to you that Holland officials developed the first draft of the township’s Petition without a word to the public, that they did only the legal minimum to encourage attendance at the public hearings, that they rejected an opportunity to put members of the public on the subcommittee, and that they were insulting and even intimidating toward the public during the hearings.  I would further contend that the summary of the public comments in Holland’s Petition distorts and misrepresents what was actually said at the hearings, and this leads to your statement that there is “a great deal of concern and confusion regarding center-based development in the Township.”  Concern, yes.  But I don’t think we’re confused at all.

 

I hope that the suggestion in your letter for an MOU and an Action Plan could provide an opportunity to involve the public even at this late date.  Strangely, after Holland’s petition was submitted, and at about the same time that the Petition was declared complete in your July 19, 2007 letter, Holland Mayor Bernard O’Brien at the July 17, 2007 Township Committee meeting appointed a committee to review the Plan Endorsement submission and make recommendations for the next iteration.

 

OSG can at least partly remedy the lack of meaningful public participation in Plan Endorsement by giving this new committee a defined role specified in the Action Plan.  I would first suggest that OSG look at the membership of the committee appointed by the Mayor and propose some expansion.  I don’t believe that it includes members from most of the groups  suggested in your Guidelines for Plan Endorsement:  “the board of adjustment, the Board of Education, the sewerage authority, several public members representing diverse interests, such as social, economic, housing, environmental, agricultural, and where applicable, the Environmental and the Historic Preservation Commissions.”

 

Up to now, Holland’s Plan Endorsement process has been mainly conducted behind closed doors, with the public having to inform themselves and force entry into the discussion.  It would be a travesty to allow the township planner and a small group of officials to dictate how our township responds to all the consequential matters brought out in your letter. 

 

I ask you to carve out a roll for meaningful public participation and define that role in the Action Plan.  After all, as it says on the top of page 12 in your own Guidelines, “Involving the public in every step of the Plan Endorsement process is critical.”

 

While concerns about public participation are my main focus, I also offer brief background information on several other topics in your letter.

 

OSG has wisely asked what Holland officials have done to turn nice words into enforceable ordinances.  In most cases, the answer is “nothing.”  For example, on page 3, your letter asks what the township has done to reduce density to “one dwelling unit per each ten (10) acres for conventional development” as promised in the Master Plan, adopted in May 2001.  For six and a half years, our group has been urging township officials to make good on that promise.  Officials said they needed solid, legally-defensible grounds for rezoning, so they employed hydrogeologist Peter Demicco to do a study.  Completed in December 2004, Demicco’s work showed that nitrate dilution characteristics justify 10-acre zoning in most of the town and 15-acre zoning near C-1 streams.  Nearly three years passed, and no ordinance was introduced.  Until last Monday, October 8, when planner McKenzie appeared at the planning board meeting

 

 

with a draft ordinance for the Conservation/Agriculture zone.  Amazing coincidence, or a rapid response to your October 4 letter?

 

This issue of 10-acre zoning links to the requirement on page 2 of your letter for a build-out analysis “based on the current zoning.”  The current zoning in most of Holland is still one dwelling unit on five acres.  If the township now shows the intent, more than six years after the Master Plan but only four days after your letter, to move to 10-acre zoning, should not that promised ordinance be the basis for a build-out analysis?

 

On the issues of “protection of critical habitat” and “beneficial reuse of historic sites” addressed on page 4 of the  letter, Holland officials are lobbying the DEP to ignore the Landscape Project designation on Block 6, Lot 61 so as to allow a sewer extension to the property that would enable 12 apartments to be built.  This site, listed as the “Godly Farmstead” among the historic sites in Holland and Hunterdon County, would have the stone house and outbuildings infringed upon by apartment buildings.  In short, no ordinances to protect, but rather actions that threaten critical habitat and historic resources.

 

At the bottom of page 2, your letter asks for clarification on what is actually proposed at Huntington Knolls.  Good luck on that.  This project has had more changes than the “Transformers” movie.  In fact, it’s grown more confusing of late because the developer has filed a Motion for Relief with COAH, asking them to order Holland to allow higher density and the removal of the age-restricted requirement.  Both the developer’s Motion and Holland’s response are posted on our Web site at www.hollandhighlands.org

 

On page 5 of your letter, you ask about a wellhead protection ordinance.  There is none.  In fact, back in 2002, when the DEP published i-maps of the threatened areas around public wells, our group was in the midst of opposing an inappropriate major subdivision in the Highlands area of Holland.  Twelve of the 15 septic systems in this subdivision fell within Tiers 1 – 3 on the DEP map’s wellhead protection area around a Holland public well.  Yet, the Holland planning board refused to act on this new information released during the course of three public hearings.  The then-chairman of the board told us, “Unless you can force me to do anything about it, I don’t care.”  

 

That is the attitude we have confronted for years.  Today, Holland officials are in the process of adopting a Riparian Conservation ordinance and an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) ordinance because the DEP has ordered them to do so to gain approval of Holland’s Wastewater Management Plan.  The EIA was drafted five and a half years ago by the Environmental Commission representative on the planning board, but then it was reviewed in excruciating slow motion by the township attorney, bounced back and forth, never treated with any urgency, and not adopted to this day.

 

From personal observation over many years, I believe that Holland officials talk a good game, but they don’t put actual ordinances in place until a state agency forces them to do so.  Thank you for forcing them to take action on some of the issues our group has been advocating for many years. 

 

I do note one surprising element that is missing from your October 4 letter.  OSG itself, in a March 20, 2007 letter that found Holland’s plan incomplete, detailed some “Preliminary consistency concerns.”  The March OSG letter said that Holland’s plan “needs to be revised to address the consistency of current land use regulations with the goals, requirements, and policies of the Highlands draft Regional Master Plan.”  In an August 31, 2007 consistency letter to you, the Highlands Council Executive Director calls for the same thing OSG requested in March, that “the Holland Township petition be required to include an evaluation of consistency with the draft RMP policies, Land Use Capability Map data layers, and supporting technical reports.”

 

Therefore, it was puzzling to see that your October 4 letter never mentions requiring Holland to demonstrate consistency with the draft RMP.  Even more disturbing, your letter criticizes the boundaries of the Hamlets because they may not accommodate required growth.  In contrast, the Highlands Council August 31 consistency letter says that “the delineation of the Hamlets does not support State Plan goals for smart growth principles in that the proposed Hamlets do not connect development with existing infrastructure.”  The Highlands LUCM places both proposed Hamlets in the Conservation Zone.  The map properly places the Planned Community Zone in the area served by existing infrastructure.  Despite confusing talk from Holland officials about the “water franchise area,” the real-world fact is that the water pipes in the ground stop at the Holland School and would have to be extended several thousand feet south on Route 519 in order to serve the proposed North Hamlet.  Your October 4 letter could be interpreted to demonstrate that OSG is not working in concert with the Highlands Council.  I hope that is not true. 

 

I apologize for the length of this letter, but I feel that members of the Holland public have few opportunities to influence Plan Endorsement.  I look forward to the promised “public education meeting” in Holland and expect it could be educational for all sides.

 

Sincerely,

 

 

 

Michael Keady, President

 

Cc.       Eileen Swan, Executive Director, New Jersey Highlands Council

            Thomas Borden, Deputy Executive Director, New Jersey Highlands Council