By Frank Mustac, Special Writer
The number of affordable housing units that should be built to meet Hopewell Township’s legal obligations will be decided by a judge following a trial scheduled to start in June.
Attorney Michael W. Herbert told the Hopewell Township Committee on Monday that the case Superior Court Judge Mary Jacobson will hear in about three months includes several other towns in Mercer County along with Hopewell.
Mr. Herbert substituted for Township Attorney Steven Goodell at the governing body meeting on March 14.
“Here in Mercer County, Judge Jacobson is taking a wait-and-see approach to how the affordable housing litigation is developing,” Mr. Herbert said, explaining that “each county is doing things a little bit differently.”
In Ocean County, he said, Judge Mark Troncone issued a decision in February concerning a stretch of years from the late 1990s to the present called a “gap period.”
“That’s the period of time . . . that no affordable housing regulations were approved by COAH or approved by the courts,” Mr. Herbert said, essentially meaning that the number of housing units for low- and middle-income buyers that towns in Ocean County would be constitutional obligated to provide could possibly be increased to take the gap period into account.
COAH is an acronym for the Council on Affordable Housing, a state agency.
“Judge Troncone also found that no municipality could be required to go above the 1,000 unit cap requirement to produce a thousand units over a 10-year period, and that anything over the cap had to be pushed off down the road,” Mr. Herbert said.
By contrast, he said that Judge Douglas Wolfson in Middlesex County “found that there really wasn’t any cap.”
Judge Troncone’s opinion is in the process of being appealed by a consortium of more than 100 municipalities that includes Hopewell Township, according to Mr. Herbert.That consortium has hired a company called Econsult Solutions Inc. of Philadelphia to calculate the number of affordable housing units each town in the consortium is legally obliged to provide as determined by firm’s experts.
Hopewell Township will likely present its numbers from Econsult to Judge Jacobson at the Mercer County trial in June.
Mayor Kevin Kuchinski said he understood that a “revised methodology” for calculating the affordable-housing numbers for Mercer County towns was being provided to Judge Jacobson by Richard B. Reading Associates, a consulting firm in Princeton.
Dr. Reading is a court-appointed special regional master tasked to advise the court and analyze the affordable housing calculations previously produced by the Fair Share Housing Center, a nonprofit affordable housing advocacy organization.
Late last year, the number for Hopewell Township calculated by Dr. Reading’s staff was 891. Princeton-based planning consultant David Kinsey, working for the Fair Share Housing Center, calculated Hopewell Township’s prospective need for affordable housing to be a minimum of 1,200 units.
Mr. Herbert, the attorney, told Mayor Kuchinski that a draft of the revised methodology from Reading Associates was due to the court on March 14, and that he would make a copy of the document available once he receives it.
“Dr. Reading has been better than Dr. Kinsey, but not quite as good as Econsult,” Mr. Herbert said, referring to the affordable housing numbers provided by the different consulting companies. He did not say what the number was from Econsult.
