Category Archives: Uncategorized
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Sharks Circling Chatham!
- Would you like to see hundreds more cars and trucks clogging up our streets, making it harder to get to work, school, MDs?
- Would you like to park in a dangerous, windowless garage, where a police officer right outside couldn’t hear your screams?
- Would you like to pay higher taxes – and lower the value of your house – to give a big developer a 30-year tax break?
Big real estate interests have ensnared Chatham Borough in an extreme, risky corporate welfare scheme. They plan to build a massive, multi-story, 200-unit rental apartment/retail complex behind our Post Office. It will transform our town into a bleak, high-tax, transit hub and, ultimately, a failed city.
Only your new Mayor and Borough Council can prevent that!
Come help your neighbors encourage them:
This Monday, January 6, 2020
at 7:30 PM
Borough Hall, 54 Fairmount Avenue, Chatham, NJ
Assure the new Mayor and Council that you will support them in doing what’s best for Chatham:
- Let the Redeveloper’s designation expire;
- Rescind the Redevelopment Plan for Post Office Plaza;
- Consider moderate options that don’t involve:
- worsening traffic;
- sacrificing our open-air, public parking;
- giving away corporate welfare tax breaks; or
- shifting business risks to Chatham taxpayers; and
- Conduct due diligence, and a valid survey of all households and businesses by U.S. Mail, with pros and cons of at least three such options.
Has the ship sailed?
- “The plan is in its early stages,” claim some proponents of the scheme to give a “Redeveloper” a big tax break to turn our little Chatham Borough into a transit hub city.
- “We can always walk away,” they insist, out of one side of their mouths.
- “We can’t back out now,” they say out of the other side. “We’ll get stuck with huge expenses.” *
Not one of those statements is true.
That corporate welfare scheme for Post Office Plaza has been brewing for years. We simply didn’t get certain horrible details until last month’s post-election meeting of the old Mayor Harris and his Borough Council. That’s when the old Mayor’s tin-eared, designated Redeveloper revealed his nightmarish designs for Chatham. CBC Meeting 11 14 19
The process of imposing those designs on Chatham is actually in its late stages. The old Mayor set a tight schedule to get Chatham hog-tied to his tin-eared Redeveloper’s vision by April 2020 – with Developer and Financial Agreements that will legally lock us into the scheme.
Source: 2019 Borough Council
How could the old Mayor do that when he isn’t even allowed to vote on the Post Office Plaza project because of a potential conflict of interest?
Easy. As mayor, he controls the Council’s agenda.
That’s also how the old Mayor was able to suddenly decide – just two days before his final Council meeting – to have the Council vote to saddle his successor with the same tainted scheme by extending the same tin-eared Redeveloper for another six months. They did just that at the December 19 meeting, over the objections of a packed house, making it much harder for Chatham to escape this nightmare.
Harder, but not impossible.
Our newly-elected 2020 Mayor Thad Kobylarz and his new Council can still correct all that. They have the power to abandon the tainted Redevelopment Plan scheme and make Chatham better for all of us – not only one rich developer.
Will they use that power for the public good?
* Not true, according to the Post Office Redevelopment Plan posted on the Council’s web site and an insider who has been intimately involved in this process for years.
Would you like to see hundreds more cars on Main Street?
Did you know that a big developer plans to plop a massive, 5.4-acre, multi-story complex in the middle of our little town, turning it overnight into a little city, with city nightlife and city problems?
Incredible but true: with traffic already backed up most of the day, and empty storefronts on Main Street, the developer plans to build even more retail space and some 230 new residential rental units, which will mean hundreds more cars day and night.
You assume they’ve considered the effect on Chatham’s residents, traffic, policing, schools, etc? Nope. They say they’ll get to that “eventually.”
Do you think our Borough Council should proceed blindly, assuming that this is what you want – and hoping for the best – or would it be wiser to stop and consider the risks, consequences and alternatives before it’s too late?
Come to the neighborhood meeting, this Sunday, Dec. 15, 2019 from 2:45 PM to 4:30 PM in the big Lundt Meeting Room in the basement of the Chatham Library at 214 Main Street.
All Chatham residents, property owners and business owners are welcome.
South East corner of Lafayette & Main, Monday June 11 around 7:30 pm
Lost: Your Right to Vote on the School Budget
On Oct. 5, 2015, your Chatham School Board abolished your right to vote on its $60 million annual operating budget. With that vote, the Board ended a Chatham tradition, destroying one of the pillars of community support for our schools and our property values.
The Board abolished your right to vote for its own convenience. The Board did so without publicizing the issue, and over the objection of almost every citizen who had ever publicly opined on the subject, including some 300 voters who had submitted written petitions and dozens more who had spoken out at recent Board Meetings, pleading with the School Board not to take away their right to vote – or at least to give voters a chance to vote on a Public Question on the matter.
See minute 28:36 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bwTflp7EfU&list=PLtSqyQYTV1Iy6G-Bpc8toxsoCjmzvCsgI&index=136
At the 5 Oct 2015 Board meeting among the crowd beseeching the Board to preserve our right to vote were Chatham residents off all stripes, including booster parents, empty-nesters, retired folks, education activists, and longtime staunch school budget supporters, as well as the usual skeptics, all united in opposition to losing our right to vote on the school budget. (Skip to 22 minutes.) At least one former Board member warned of the risks. Most of the School Board turned a deaf ear to all their pleas.
One Board member stooped to browbeating a constituent on camera at the August 31, 2015 meeting, which can be seen on the videotape, starting at approx. 1 hour, 43 minutes or here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=OE1pBqd3_Yc
The Board returned for the September 15th meeting armed with several specious arguments for taking away our right to vote, none of which have withstood scrutiny. See “Losing your right to vote: fact versus myth.”
The chief effect of last night’s Board resolution is to spare the Board the bother of having to justify the way they choose to spend 2/3 of our property tax dollars. The resolution also deprives Chatham voters of any meaningful say in the operation of our schools until at least 2020. In effect, we’ve written a blank check.
Each year from now on, we will be required to give the Board at least as much money as we gave them last year, to spend as they please – plus an extra 2% if they so desire – plus whatever it takes to cover certain exempt costs, including medical and pension expenses we can’t even guess at. Unless the Board requires even more than that – say for a big capital project – the public and even parents will have no meaningful say in the operation of our schools and we will be powerless to correct bad budgets or rein in excessive or misguided spending.
Board member Richard Connors, a lawyer, made a poignant speech about how he was serving the children of Chatham by stripping their parents of the right to vote on the school budget. Only Matt Gilfillan and Kim Cronin dissented out of respect for justice. Lata Kenney was absent.
A citizen who expressed his dismay from the back row was escorted from the room by a Chatham Township police officer, on hand in response to extremely exaggerated Board claims of booing and shouting at the September 15th meeting. A participant at that meeting recalls only a single boo, noted but inaudible on the videotape at approx. 24 minutes, 24 seconds and someone talking out of turn at 49 minutes.
The timing of the Board’s decision to abolish our vote raised concerns that it was done in reaction to record 35% voter turnout to reject the Board’s $25 million Arts Center referendum by 2 to 1 last April 2015. Before that, the Board had not shown any serious interest in exercising its power to abolish our right to vote on the budget. Member Richard Connors – leading proponent of abolishing our right to vote this time – had opposed a similar proposal by Lata Kenney that failed by a vote of 6 to 2 back on March 28, 2011. Even after most other school boards had done away with budget voting, our Board deferred to the recommendation of the Finance Committee to preserve budget voting. All that changed only after Chatham voters rejected the $25 million Arts Center referendum in April 2015.
What can you do? Plenty:
Get the facts.
Write a letter to the editor: [email protected]
Demand that the Board promise to restore our right to vote at the first chance. [email protected] and 973-457-2400.
Find out what the Board is up to next.
Attend the next Board meeting on Nov 2, 2015 at 7:30 pm at the Chatham Township Municipal Building, 58 Meyersville Road.
Never vote YES without fully understanding both sides.
Sign the petition.
Volunteer to serve on the Board. The next election will be in Nov. 2016.
Stay informed. Read the Tap. Visit ChathamChoice.org.