Hometown Chatham

Lawyer to Chatham: Shut up!

Written by

brigidmcmenamin

in

Can you believe it’s almost 2026?

That’s New Jersey’s deadline for our Planning Board to revise the all-important Master Plan that will guide Borough decision-making and development for the next ten years.

To get that job done, the Planning Board will need to get residents to attend meetings and share ideas, which few residents do.

How can the Planning Board attract Chathamites to the meetings, and get them engaged in the process?

How about muzzling residents? Seriously.

The Planning Board already chooses not to Zoom most of its meetings, and does NOT allow residents to participate by Zoom.

At the December 3rd meeting, which was not Zoomed, Planning Board lawyer Vincent Loughlin advocated taking it one step further: changing the Board’s bylaws to do away with the traditional Public Comment period we have come to expect at every Borough meeting, severely restricting normal, public participation in-person. (See the meeting video below, starting at approximately 11:34.)

”There’s so much misunderstanding about how municipal government functions,” says Laughlin. His solution? Totally shut out all public participation except on the matter before the Planning Board at that moment, typically limited to cross examination and sworn testimony on a specific application.

Lawyers don’t make policy like that. Who told Mr. Laughlin to push abolishing Public Comment at Planning Board meetings?

”[Borough Administrator and Planning Board member]Steve Williams suggested that perhaps we could remove that [Public Comment period] from the agenda,” said the Borough Clerk. “So that would remove the public portion where the public can speak from the agenda so they would only speak if we had an application.” (See meeting video below.)

Kudos to those alert Planning Board members who had the good sense to resist that flagrant power grab. We can only hope they will stay strong.

You can see it all in the video below, where the meeting begins about 7:29 and the discussion of abolishing Public Comments begins about 11:34.

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