Teaneck Voices History of Blight and Redevelopment

Published On June 6, 2022 » 882 Views» By Charles Powers » Slider, Uncategorized

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Summary

The current Council, abetted by its Planning Board, has introduced a new way to determine the development it wants for Teaneck and directly control the entire process. In doing so, Council ignores the vision for Teaneck’s character laid out in its Master Plan and bypasses the town’s existing zoning rules.
Normally, development projects must conform to the Master Plan and the Planning Board and Board of Adjustment exist to make sure that they do so, while guaranteeing public input and an open bidding process.
By designating areas of Teaneck as blighted Areas In Need of Redevelopment (AINRs), Council has subverted the normal way that land use in our town is governed and deprived residents of their right to determine how the town evolves.
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45 Years ago, a deeply divided Teaneck wrestled with whether to allow development of the marshy disfigured area we now know as Glenpointe. In 1977, the Town Council openly and transparently created a carefully crafted Teaneck Redevelopment Agency to which it appointed a balanced and respected leadership. The Agency functioned as a public entity with a board and open meetings.And it was completely separate from the Town Council.

This Agency – amidst very robust public debate – guided the town to the development solutions we now identify with the Glenpointe complex, the area in the south east corner of the Town.

That was the one and only time in Teaneck’s history that Teaneck officials had designated part of this Township as being blighted and thus in need of redevelopment.

The Teaneck Redevelopment Agency eventually handed decision-making about Glenpointe back to the normal land use processes. It did this long before 2008 when Council formally abolished the Agency.

Suddenly, a Completely New Land Use System Emerged

Formally beginning in November 2018, Council began stealthily pursuing a completely different model of municipal land use decision-making.

It has now prioritized regularly declaring some new part of Town to be an “Area in Need of Redevelopment” – that is, a “blighted” area.

This new process always begins with the unannounced appearance on the Council’s consent agenda (see previous Voices issue) of an innocuous request that the Planning Board conduct an investigation of yet one more township area as a potential Area in Need of Redevelopment (AINR).

The area can be as small as a single lot, or up to a large multi-acre area comprised of tens of lots. These Council requests to the Planning Board make no reference whatsoever to the Township’s Master Plan. They show no respect whatsoever for the area’s existing zoning.

Instead, the Council simply asks the Planning Board if any one of eight state-listed criteria would allow Council to declare its newly designated “area” so fundamentally flawed that the municipality can use extraordinary and non-competitive processes to redefine the area and allow – in secret – a developer of its own choosing to propose a brand new development plan for the area.

This new process for development is already in place! It will almost surely come as a shock to most of our readers to know the following:

· Council has now proposed that nine areas in Town be designated Areas in Need of Redevelopment (AINRs) – blighted. Remember, we had previously had only one such area in the entire history of the Township – and that was 45 years ago.
· The pace of Council’s dash to find blight has accelerated radically in the past five and a half months –there have been five new Council resolutions naming potential AINR’s that began in mid-December 2021. One new AINR has been proposed in each of the past three months – and the size of each of these AINR’s is growing.
· There is now one new AINR proposed in every one of Teaneck’s four quadrants – but the Northeast now has been named as home to five such potentially blighted areas.
· Although these resolutions keep popping up on Council agendas, there is absolutely no explanation as to which officials or what mechanism Council used in deciding where and how to define these areas; they are simply included with no prior notice on the Council agendas.·
On Tuesday May 31, there were two resolutions on the Council agenda announcing that Council had been told “Yes, go ahead. The Planning Board looked at them and lo and behold they are so flawed as to meet the criteria of being in need of redevelopment.”
The Planning Board has always done the Council’s bidding on AINRs’
· The latest AINR sent by Council to the Planning Board consists primarily of single family homes in what is currently a R/S (single family residential) zone. There is still no hint why Council decided – in secret – that area should become one more AINR.
· Three of the nine designated AINR’s consist of property wholly owned by the Township itself. Two have been allowed by the Town to deteriorate so badly that they now are officially reported to pose actual physical risks to both Town employees and residents. And another three AINR’s are partly composed of municipally-owned lots, and two of those AINR’s are apparently the most degraded part of the newly designated areas. Is the Town seeking to divert attention from the fact that it has been a negligent property owner?

The arrows on the map above of the Town’s land uses show the location of the nine Areas in Need of Redevelopment that Council has proposed to-date.

Where did Council “discover” its new land use concept?

Teaneck Voices has been raising concern about this non-democratic approach to land use decision-making for the last two years. Why have the Master Plan and its values suddenly becoming irrelevant? Why is it that a municipal governing board of elected officials suddenly started denigrating many neighborhoods of the Town that elects it?

It was not easy to find the answers. Former Mayor Hameeduddin claimed at a meeting in 2018 that he had begun exploring “redevelopment” in 2014. But the first time the full Council heard a presentation about the several ways in which “redevelopment” could be managed was at a December 2016 Council “retreat” held in the large conference room at Holy Name. The Town website provides an audio (but no video – Click Here ) of that meeting and relatively complete minutes of the redevelopment presentation given by William Rupp (Click Here). Yet nothing came of that 2016 redevelopment discussion.

The next time Council as a whole explored the redevelopment concept was again at a Council retreat that occurred in September 2018 – but this time the retreat was held in a tiny conference room at Holy Name. Only seven non-official residents were in attendance. If there was an official audio or video of that meeting, neither ever made it to the Town website.

Then Town planner, Richard Preiss made a presentation listing the various ways in which the redevelopment process could be prioritized in Teaneck, with or without naming a new Agency. The minutes of that meeting (Click Here) demonstrate how committed Mayor Hameeduddin was to a specific answer – having Council declare itself to be the Teaneck Redevelopment Agency. The following two sentences from those 9/6/2018 minutes make the point:

“Mayor Hameeduddin noted that a redevelopment agency would allow the Council to hold control over redevelopment decision making and suggested creating a subcommittee to discuss redevelopment while also having Council serve as a redevelopment agency… Mayor Hameeduddin made a motion for the Zoning Subcommittee to discuss the creation of the Redevelopment Agency and report back to the Council in October.”

Member Schwartz seconded the motion and it was adopted unanimously – along with instructions to Attorney Shahdanian to begin to create an ordinance naming the Council as the new Agency. (A Teaneck resident in attendance did make a video that night of Planner Preiss’ redevelopment presentation and the subsequent Council redevelopment agency discussion which followed it. This video is available on YouTube –Click Here and press skip ad.)

At the very next meeting of Council in October of 2018, a draft Ordinance #25-2018 was proposed that would allow the Council itself to “act as” the Redevelopment Agency. At G&W, every resident who spoke about redevelopment sharply criticized the concentration of power inherent in that draft ordinance (Click Here for a 6-minute video of those comments) which then led to perhaps the most spirited 20 minutes of Council debate in years.

Council members Rice and Pruitt articulately questioned the indefinite scope of what such an Agency would have in its purview and demanded more information about how the new agency’s processes would work (Click Here for a video of that entire Council debate).

Led by the Mayor, the Council pressed ahead to Introduce Ordinance #25-2018. But sensing the emerging need for a new consensus, the Mayor proposed a 6-week hiatus before a final vote was taken. In actual fact, that Ordinance (or anything like it) never appeared on the Council agenda again.

Nevertheless, the Council majority, most likely led by the Zoning subcommittee, had not given up on using redevelopment concepts to take control of Township land use decision-making. In fact, at the same meeting originally scheduled for a next hearing on the redevelopment agency ordinance, Councilmen Katz, Schwartz and Kaplan together suggested adding a Resolution (222-2018) that became part of the unanimously adopted consent agenda wherein Council affirmed its request that the Planning Board determine whether two municipally owned DPW properties met the criteria for being Areas in Need of Redevelopment (AINR).

And with that strange and largely incoherent process (Click Here for the 11/19/2018 minutes, pp. 11-12 and 14) Teaneck’s two derelict DPW properties had become the first instances of Teaneck’s new commitment to Council control (through use of the state’s redevelopment statutes) of the Township’s land use actions.

Hence, without ever formally adopting – or even explaining – its new way of defining land use, the Teaneck Council just keeps naming new AINR areas and almost randomly citing procedures from the state statutes as justifications for what it is doing.

Where did Council “discover” its new land use concept?

We know of no resident who has been able to follow what is happening to these AINR’s over time. As it turns out, for only one AINR has the Town yet approved a development plan which has led to the start of construction. That is the AINR at 329 Alfred Ave and 1086 Decatur whose neighborhood has, according to resident Margaret Baker, been ruined thereby.

That is the AINR at 329 Alfred Ave and 1085 Decatur whose neighborhood has, according to resident Margaret Baker, been ruined thereby.

Pictured to the right is the view that Ms. Baker now has of the lot across the street from her home where a single-family home (pictured on the left) stood until earlier this spring! (Click here to see and hear Ms. Baker tell you more!)

Teaneck Voices has tried to wade through what is happening with each AINR initiative. The image which follows summarizes what we can make of the current status of each of the nine areas

On Tuesday night (5/31/2022), buried in the Council’s Consent Agenda and not even discussed by any Council members were two resolution (Res. 147-2022 & Res 148-2022) that cited recent Planning Board reviews and officially certified that two more areas of Town are, in fact, real AINR’s, officially blighted. And the Planning Board will almost surely agree on June 9 to tell Council that the entire State Street area is – similarly – an AINR. Residents may want to ask who decided to designate them blighted and why.

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