It’s time for the Rumson Planning Board to do its job. Last spring Arthur and Leslie Parent came before the board with a plan to subdivide what is known as the Tredwell House property.
The application presented conformed to the borough’s land use regulations and in most cases would have been approved before the leaves fell from the trees.
The big holdup has been from opponents to the subdivision who say the property is too historically important to build on.
That may be so, but it would have been nice for someone to tell the Parents that before they bought the property. Now they are being asked to accommodate historic preservation when they legitimately had no expectation such a request would be made.
To their complete credit, the Parents have been accommodating. They listened to their opponents’ arguments and put the interest of the larger community ahead of their own and agreed to preserve the house that seemed to be the central issue in the dispute.
The only discernible result of the generous offer was a switch in their opponents’ focus from the house to the land.
That is wrong. Before the Parents came before the Planning Board, there was more than ample opportunity for the borough or others to take steps to preserve the property. Needless to say, they didn’t do it. To ask the Parents to do it now — at a cost only to them — goes against everything property ownership is supposed to be about.
The Planning Board should approve the Parents’ application now, and those seeking to preserve history might want to do a little forward thinking about other historically important properties.