Teaneck’s Council is currently being pressed to reach agreements with various parties who claim that the Township has not yet provided adequate commitments that it will implement developments that will allow it to comply with the State’s 4th Round specifications for the amended Fair Housing Act (FHA). The pressure is coming from all over – would be developers, from the state and its program overseeing compliance just for starters. 

As a result, Teaneck’s last month has involved a flurry of Council meetings that have splashed hundreds of pages of impenetrable legalese onto its Town website. Residents had but one day to absorb 176 pages prior to the December 22 “special meeting”.  Even worse, for its first 2026 meeting on Tuesday January 6, the website dumped 755 pages into the Friday morning agendas and then, without explanatrion, reduced that to 688 pages by Friday afternoon.  It is widely anticipated that there will be a flurry of additional pages and amendments by meeting time. TRANSPARENCY AND COMPREHENSIBILITY IS CONSISTENTLY NOT ACHIEVED by our Council and its leadership, by our administration and most egregiously by our Township attorneys.  No paginated table of contents for 688 pages? What is that – is it supposed to be funny? 

Voices has in what follows sought to provide its readers with a list of what it anticipated will be the agenda items that our readers would like to at least try to access. It has used the 688- page version that was on the website at 5 pm Sunday – but fully expects some other version to have been published prior to Council start time. 

Democracy dies when those who fund and depend on it do not know what their officialdoms are doing