Now we have a great alternative for the 5 acres behind the Main Street Post Office!
It includes more surface parking and a pretty public green space.
Longtime Chatham businesswoman and civic leader Fran Drew conceived this idea as an alternative to the proposals offered by the big Kushner developers, who stand to profit by using corporate welfare PILOT tax breaks to build a project that will destroy our little Chatham Borough, with big expenses and even more traffic on Main Street.
Chatham residents are excited about this fresh idea, which is aimed at preserving and enhancing our community.
Are you tired of ever-worsening traffic on Main Street?
Make sure this idea gets a fair hearing before our Mayor and Borough Council.
Let our Mayor and Borough Council know what you think: mayor@chathamborough.org
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.
“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.
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.
