MONDAY, AUGUST 19 AT 7:30 IN THE TEANECK LIBRARY AUDITORIUM

ALERT Voices strongly encourages all residents concerned with the Town’s future to prepare for Monday’s Planning Board meeting in the Library Auditorium by reviewing the new draft Master Plan 2024 and speaking during the public hearing. Voices is very concerned that the current draft is seriously deficient (see below) 

• Although this meeting will be available on zoom (Click Here and add passcode 095654), only those persons in actual attendance at the meeting in the Teaneck Library will be permitted to speak during the public hearing noticed for this meeting.
• The agenda for this meeting currently on the Township’s new website does not specify a public hearing but does call for a vote for adoption. The official notice for the meeting in designated media does specify a public hearing – as well as adoption – though Voices has been assured by three PB members that no adoption vote will be taken. Legally adoption cannot occur since the draft now on the new website has not been accessible for the required 10 days
• That being the case, the public hearing on Monday should provide Town residents with the opportunity specifically to guide the PB to a significant redraft and revision before the Master Plan is finalized. 

Deficient How?
– Accessibility – Different and Incomplete Versions

The process for getting Town website access to the current draft Master Plan was significantly altered when the new Township website itself was unveiled on the afternoon of August 12.  The process of getting to the 124-page draft MP is easier than it was last week.

In the search space across the top of the Website’s home page simply type in Master Plan. You will be taken in two steps to the current draft. (There have been several.)

BUT that is only the beginning of access trouble. Very likely if you scroll through the website’s MP document you will, at about p. 48 encounter this image.

And that means that getting to the real substance of the MP draft (which begins about p. 61) is impossible! That deficiency in itself is enough for residents to ask for a redraft of a document made inexcusably large (more than 18MB) by tens of large pictures in color- pictures that are without captions to explain what you are looking at.

You might assume that one way to clarify your review process would be to print specific pages. Not so easy!

• HEADS UP IF YOU WANT TO PRINT OUT SECTIONS OF THE DRAFT MASTER PLAN: The first 6 pages of the draft master plan are paginated with lowercase Roman numerals (i, ii, iii, iv, v, vi). Then the document moves to standard numbering (1,2,3….124). So to print specific pages, you need to add 6 to the actual page numbers you want to print. If you want pages 10-15 of the document, you have to ask for pages 16-21 to get the pages numbered 10 through 15. This is because your printer will count pages starting with the first Roman numeral as page 1. (If you ask for pages 10-15, you will get pages 4-9!)

Still looking for a simpler way to review the MP? Teaneck residents frequently mention topics that they would expect the Master Plan to address. Most of these concerns can be expressed in a single word or phrase. Examples are Cannabis, AINR’s, Auxiliary Dwelling Units (ADUs), Rail Safety, Pedestrian Safety, 6-Story Residential Facilities.

OK so perhaps you should just go to the search mechanism to help you explore some concept or issue as it gets covered anywhere in the MP document.

• Whoops? The search mechanism available in the lower left had corner is NOT a search system internal to the Master Plan. Instead, it is the Google’s full internet search system. So, let’s say you have been told to find the resident survey results in the Appendix. If you type Appendix into the Google search option, it takes you to a definition of Appendicitis. (We kid you not!) In sum, THERE IS NO SEARCH MECHANISM TO ALLOW THE READER TO SEARCH AND LOCATE A TOPIC OF INTEREST on the Town Website’s version of the draft Master Plan

To be sure, there again is a work around for many residents – as we explained to Voices readers last week.  The best way to take control of the MP document is to copy it onto your own computer. Here’s how:

There is an answer for those of our readers who have PDF or Adobe capability. You can

•  Copy the entire draft Master Plan from the Town website to your “Download” file. Then
• Copy that file address to wherever you keep your data files. Then
• Open that document and in the upper left-hand top line is an image of a round magnifying glass with 3 dots. THAT IS THE SEARCH/FIND MECHANISM.

Type in the word/words you want to find, and, voila! You can find whatever you seek!  But wait – not quite everything. Let’s go back to our prior example – we were looking for the Appendix promised on pp. 9 and 12 where we could see the actual results of 1800 residents to the on-line survey and the actual notes taken to explain the very short summaries of our planners’ discussions with under-represented groups and organizations.

• Whoops again – there is no Appendix. No – seriously NONE.
  Which leads us into:

Deficiencies – Substantive

We start with we ask: What is the function of a good Master Plan – What must Who do to assure it serves actual municipal functions?  Every time a development project area is identified, or conceptually approved or its final site plan is reviewed, the Planning Board must decide and tell Council:

• “this project/plan is consistent with the Master Plan!” Councils usually do not move forward if PB’s say a project/plan is “Inconsistent with the Master Plan”

So it is useful to ask, “Does this Master Plan draft have adequate specificity and consistency itself to allow the Teaneck Planning Board to make a sound judgment.

So we start with an example.  The image below is from the side of Margaret Baker’s home on Alfred & Decatur. Instead of seeing a residential home with the Palisades behind it, Ms. Baker now sees this monstrous AINR-sponsored facility every time she sits on her front steps or looks out her front windows.

Virtually every Teaneck resident we are aware of who has gone to Margaret Baker’s house has said not only “this should not have happened to the Baker family and her neighborhood”. They also say: “No, this gigantic facility was not consistent with the current 2007 Master Plan (See Objective 3 – Click Here , p.4 ). In other words, the Planning Board twice in 2021 made a mistake in saying this huge new 329 Alfred Ave facility was consistent with the Master Plan.

The question rightly to be posed about the 2024 Master Plan draft is this: does this Master Plan have sufficient specificity and clarity of purpose that would enable the Planning Board to have said – “No, this facility in this location is not consistent with our new Master Plan”.

If the current 2024 MP draft fails that test, then it is not yet ready for prime time.

And what about the 2024 draft’s discussion of AINR’s?
As our readers know, Teaneck Voices has reported our and our readers’ concerns about Areas in Need of Redevelopment (AINRs). AINR’s are a mechanism Council – without ever passing an ordinance to say so – simply began adopting as the primary way the Town has done development for the past 6 years.

So we searched and found what this Draft Master Plan has to say about them.
In a special section of the Glossary on p. 15 there is a “matter of fact” discussion of the NJ state statute’s redevelopment process – which actually was created to deal with real urban blight. The Glossary provides no hint that ever since the June 14, 2023 first MP Kick-off meeting, residents have actively complained about the Town’s and Council’s misuse of AINR’s. (See Click Here) or better If the summary of that meeting had been included in an Appendix, that concern about AINR misuse would have had to be cited. To add insult to injury, on page 41 through 3 lines on page 43, this draft devotes minimal space to this draconian effort to erase zoning in 9 specific areas of Teaneck. Ironically, these AINR projects are treated as though they are just another type of zoning – when, in fact, AINR’s ALL dispense with existing zoning in the Areas in Need of Redevelopment identified.

Recall that AINRs are part of the State’s redevelopment law to name and renovate “blighted” areas, a process that wipes out any established zoning and allows the governing body to do essentially whatever it wants and largely in closed session consultation with unnamed developers who are not selected by any competitive process.

Not only does the new Draft Master Plan include this devious device under the Zoning section of the Plan, but, more importantly, IT SAYS NOTHING ABOUT THE ONGOING AND ALMOST UNIVERSAL OBJECTION OF TOWN RESIDENTS TO THE WHOLE CONCEPT AS EXPRESSED IN THE COMMUNITY MEETINGS, COUNCIL & PLANNING BOARD GOOD & WELFARE SESSIONS, AND RESPONSES TO SURVEY QUESTIONS.

An example of this apparent preference for AINR’s is this draft’s badly distorted citation of the planner’s 2019 State Street Impact Study as though it supported the subsequent designation of the State Street AINR.

We ask Town Residents to carefully review these 3 pages of AINR coverage in order to comment on and evaluate the Planning Board answers at the meeting on August 19.

Finally the USER-FRIENDLINESS of the draft

Here are our recommendations

• Add an Executive Summary –
• A paragraph describing present-day Teaneck (mature suburb, almost fully developed, etc.),
• A Vision for the Teaneck described. The Vision statement on Page 11 could apply to any municipality,
• brief statement of the methodology used to infer from community meetings, surveys, etc. to the goals and objectives
• provide a more inclusive List of Goals with 1-2 sentence Objectives (see 2007 Teaneck Master Plan for example),
• Place Acknowledgements and Glossaries at the back of the Document,
• Re-paginate the document: remove all Roman numerals and begin the first page as Page #1. This will allow easy selective printing.
• Caption all photos and provide relevance of each. Do we need so many large pictures of the October 2023 meeting attended by fewer than 40 residents?

Voices assumes that by the end if the Monday night PB meeting, the general outline of what is needed to revise the current draft will have emerged. It will likely be a month until a follow-up public hearing and final consideration of a new draft occurs. Please contact us, at teaneckvoices@gmail.com with any thoughts, comments, or suggestions Voices can provide to the Planning Board as this process moves forward.