Teaneck’s land use boards have been regularly criticized in the past several years for failing to follow all the rules when scheduling agendas and hearings on important decisions. And when residents have either sued the Town entities, they have often been successful. (The best recent example was resident success in  securing fully integrated affordable and market housing in the new townhouse development at the former Holuba site).

Last week when an agenda item to approve two site plans proposed by the HNMC and related to the Holy Name hospital zone expansion suddenly appeared on the Township website’s October 13 Planning Board agenda, the Town received a letter from Robert Simon, Esq. the attorney who, representing 12 HNMC neighbors, has sued both the Town and the Planning Board about procedural and substantive problems with the Spring 2022 ordinances which approved that hospital zone expansion.  Attorney Simon’s letter cited many mistakes made in the process by which those site plan agendas were noticed.  As a result at the PB 10/13 meeting, the hospital and the PB, guided by the PB’s substitute (conflict) attorney who has replaced the PB’s regular attorney (another long story), pulled the proposed site plans from the PB 10/13 agenda and agreed that the hospital would need to begin the process of properly noticing affected residents and the public so that the site plans could be heard by the Planning Board at its 10/27 meeting. What follows here is the letter written by Attorney Simon which achieved that delay:

Teaneck – Letter to Board as to Jurisdictional Defects 10-13-2022