Guest Column
Many questions remain
on plan for new street
Patrick W. Duffy
Guest Column
Many questions remain
on plan for new street
My wife and I own a home in the Forest Ridge development in Howell, where we have lived with our three young children since 1999. We were shocked when we heard that the Township Council was considering constructing a new road in our neighborhood in order to provide the sole access for Hidden View, a 177-unit senior housing development in Wall Township.
I attended the council meeting on June 29 in the hope of obtaining information that would lay to rest our concerns about this proposal. Instead of getting answers, what I heard at that meeting only led to more questions and concerns.
On the one hand, a statement was made that this proposal is only a few weeks old and is far from being cast in stone. On the other hand, it was stated that the township already has tentative approval of some sort from the state Department of Environ-mental Protection (DEP) in connection with wetlands impacts of the proposed road.
A proposal of this significance and magnitude should be fully aired publicly prior to spending public funds to pursue any kind of approval from DEP. This makes me seriously wonder what other expenditures of public funds and employee time has already been devoted to this road proposal. The taxpayers of Howell are entitled to a full financial accounting.
I learned that this road proposal is the result of pressure from another neighborhood containing Cherry and Red Bud lanes that end at the municipal boundary and were approved for access to the development site. I heard that this had been the subject of litigation in which the courts invalidated action by Howell to vacate these two streets and ruled that the developer is entitled to connect its project to those streets. The current road proposal seems to disregard that court ruling.
I found the court decision from the litigation … it was clear that the court had in fact ruled that Howell cannot prevent the development from being served by the two streets in question. The court decision also indicated that any concerns by Howell as to traffic impacts of the development should have been addressed by directly challenging the rezoning of the property to allow more intensive development, rather than by vacating the two access streets.
The court also said that because Howell had not pursued such litigation previously, it was now too late to do so. I request an explanation as to why that did not occur.
There was some talk about annexing the developer’s property so that it would become part of Howell. How would that work and who would pay for it? Also, how would the zoning and development approvals for the property be affected? The court decision seemed to place significance on the fact that the development project would be paying $900,000 to Wall for its affordable housing plan, which had been approved in other litigation. Would Wall still receive that benefit if the property became part of Howell?
It seems to me that a road designed solely to serve a single development project would be indistinguishable from a private driveway. So how could that be viewed as a public purpose allowing the expenditure of public funds for construction and future maintenance? A cost of $750,000 to construct this road has been reported in the local papers. Who arrived at this number and what criteria did they use?
There appears to have been a serious failure on the part of township officials to protect residents from significant traffic impacts of a major development in Wall by not challenging Wall’s zoning decision to allow high density development that can only be served by access through local streets in Howell. The appellate court indicated that such action could have been taken, so why wasn’t it? Instead, it seems that thousands of dollars in public funds were wasted on litigation in an unsuccessful attempt to defend street vacation ordinances. It is also apparent that public funds continue to be spent on this subject. As a resident and taxpayer of Howell, I demand answers to these questions.
Patrick W. Duffy is a resident of Howell.