Public controversy has swirled around how & why the Town’s recent settlement of Stop & Shop’s litigation is said to have included quite specific Town commitments as to how the two AINR’s that sandwich Cedar Lane’s key retail district will be redeveloped with massive new high-rise facilities

Neither the settlement itself nor the plans the settlement language references had ever been mentioned in a Council agenda before the Mayor suddenly “walked-in” the settlement resolution to Council’s 9/20 meeting & had it read by the Clerk. No printed version of that resolution nor its attached plans had been made public before Council passed the resolution later in the 9/20 meeting. Immediate public criticism was intense.

In an apparent effort to quell the growing storm criticizing both process and substance, Mayor Dunleavy suddenly announced that he would “divert from the printed agenda” at min34 of the next (10/25) Council video saying Town attorneys wanted to clarify the settlement to “assure the public has correct information”.

Enter attorney Reginald Jenkins who delivered a 13–minute statement that contained a variety of assertions about the settlement that were at best misleading including that the settlement “did not include a development plan written in stone” – a claim then repeated by the Mayor. DM Katz then said: “so nothing is done yet”; CM Kaplan claimed “no plans exist”. (For this entire sequence, Click Here and move the cursor to 37min.

Luckily, a Teaneck resident had paid far better attention to the settlement’s actual words than did the Council or its attorneys. Listen/watch the explicit & accurate 3-min G&W refutation by resident/attorney Ron Schwartz of the claim that

nothing has happened & that “many meetings” with public input will occur before anything is either proposed/decided. Ron Schwartz alone cites the document in this brief video of his G&W statement

Click Here for that statement which all our readers should watch/hear

So powerful was this Schwartz statement that Council & attorney Shahdanian then broke protocol to interrupt G&W for 7-minutes claiming they needed to “correct” Schwartz misinformation by restating their misleading statements that that nothing had been decided. Unfortunately, they provided not a word of documentary evidence to back their claims.