Terrific showing at last night’s Town Hall on the reckless overdevelopment of Post Office Plaza.
Were you satisfied with the options on offer? Prefer to see a broader range of better options? Hit this link: https://forms.gle/9gmtKu4SE6Yr4YP28
We’ll have another shot at it next Monday night, April 25, 7:30, when Borough lawyer Jonathan Drill returns to the Middle School auditorium to spin us with half-truths, as he did at the April 6 Zoom meeting:
Just don’t let him badger, interrupt, condescend to and bully you (as he did last night) into picking one of his options. Let’s get all the facts before making any choices.
Whatever the eventual outcome, Chatham will be far better off because of our efforts.
Best thing to do now is write a quick letter to the editor. https://www.tapinto.net/towns/chatham/ Give your opinion of last night’s Town Hall. Maybe mention our wonderful moderator. The Council’s failure to participate. The Mayor suddenly ending the meeting when he’d promised to go all night. Their failure to negotiate with Fran Drew as with the other bidders.
Why are our Mayor & Council in such a big hurry to decide the fate of Post Office Plaza on May 2, only two weeks after they see the options on April 18?
Are they racing to satisfy our affordable housing quota?*
“The Borough is also facing a June deadline deciding how this requirement will be met,” wrote Council member Jocelyn Mathiasen in a March 21, 2022 letter to the TAP.
That’s what we hear from Chatham lawyer Jonathan Drill.
“The Borough has to come up with something, and have an agreement reached with somebody by June 1… or we could be facing some legal problems…” said Mr. Drill on an April 6, 2022 Zoom with residents.
But that isn’t what it says in the agreement our Mayor signed last June 14, 2021.**
And it isn’t what Mr. Drill had our planning expert testify – under oath – at an August 6, 2021 hearing where the judge approved that agreement:
“[T}he Redevelopment Agreement is due by, well, by June first of 2022…,” she testified. “[T]here are some options that if we aren’t able to come to some agreement with a redeveloper by that particular date that we could either substitute a separate… affordable housing mechanism… or ask for an extension if we are moving forward with the, a redeveloper for that area…”***
So far, Mr. Drill has refused to explain why he insists that June 1 date is written in stone.
Best any layman can tell, that June 1 date was a mere target date – not written in stone.
The judge didn’t even mention June 1 in his order approving the June 14 agreement.***
There is no apparent reason for our Mayor & Council to lunge ahead with a proposal we haven’t even seen yet.
There is no reason why the Mayor & Council cannot put a broad range of proposals on their voting menu, including a proposal to convert existing market rate apartments to affordable housing, also called “Market-to-Affordable” or “M2A.”
Epilogue: Caught lying about that alleged June 1 deadline, Mr. Drill then postponed a different (April 29) deadline to June 1, in a clever bid to save face at the April 18 Town Hall. https://chathamchoice.org/2022/04/
(The access code is: 1234. Download a copy to a Windows computer and click on “Extract All.” After extracting (unzip), look in the BIN folder, double click on the CPLAYER file, and press the arrow to start playing it. Save the file. The link expires at the end of May 2022.)
Chatham Borough now faces the biggest decision in its long history: the fate of Post Office Plaza.
Our Mayor & Council are set to reveal the options this Monday, April 18th, and hold a FINAL VOTE only two weeks later, on May 2nd!
That is not enough time to think about – much less let us residents comment on – a decision that will affect all of us and generations to follow.
Please help the Mayor & Council get this one right.
1. Sign this letter: https://forms.gle/9gmtKu4SE6Yr4YP28, which asks the Mayor & Council to include a broad range of proposals on the menu of voting options.
2. Alert friends & neighbors: Cut, copy and forward this by e-mail or text, and share it on social media.
3. Bring friends & neighbors to the Town Hall this Monday, April 18, 7:30 pm, Chatham Middle School auditorium, 480 Main Street.
Ask them togive themselves more time to think – and consider what we residents want – before voting (June 1 is not a hard & fast deadline – see link here https://chathamchoice.org/2022/04/);
Insist that they include on the menu of voting options a broad range of proposals for Post Office Plaza – at least one that does not involve new construction, or impinge on our public parking lot (such as Market-to-Affordable).
The postcard above appeared in Chatham mailboxes on Monday 3/28 and Tuesday 3/29. That night – on the eve of the Wednesday 3/30 Town Hall – the Mayor & Council suddenly announced that they were POSTPONING the 3/30 Town Hall AGAIN, this time claiming that “very recent developments involving POP require further review and analysis.”
You want to spruce up Post Office Plaza and meet our affordable housing requirements?
There are essentially two ways to do it:
1) sacrifice our convenient, surface, public parking lot and let a developer build a commercial project that will turn downtown Chatham into a crowded, traffic nightmare, or else
2) satisfy the affordable housing quota by subsidizing 15 existing apartments, and pretty up POP as WE see fit, while preserving our popular surface public parking,
Which option sounds better to you? Not sure? You need to see them? Here’s what we’ve seen so far:
The developer-driven option would look something like this:
The second, far more moderate option would look something like this:
Above shows a great proposal by longtime Chatham community leader Fran Drew, to make Post Office Plaza more attractive and useful without sacrificing our convenient public parking or clogging our streets with additional traffic.
Fran Drew’s proposal is a far better fit for Chatham Borough, and it complements the sensible, moderate, kind way to provide affordable housing. More information: https://chathamchoice.org/2021/07/
Is the Council even considering the sensible, moderate, kind approach to POP? The Mayor won’t say!
Will we get stuck with the developer’s choice anyway? We’ll know on April 18, when the Council votes on it!
To see the five proposals under consideration, come to a special Town Hall meeting:
Wednesday, March 30, 7:30 pm, Chatham Middle School auditorium, 480 Main Street
Now it’s time for the Mayor to reveal the five options under consideration, so we can prepare for that Town Hall meeting. If his lawyer said it was ok to do that for the Monday 3/21 meeting, there’s no reason he can’t release the information on Monday 3/21.
The Mayor would be wise to include at least one good option – this one:
That’s the perfect compliment to Fran Drew’s popular proposal:
Chatham residents are excited about this fresh idea for Post Office Plaza, conceived in 2020 by Fran Drew and Kristy Chmura and drawn by landscape architect Dimitry Levetsky, as a welcome alternative to the schemes proposed by the big Kushner developers in their bid for corporate welfare tax breaks at the expense of our little town.
What do our Mayor and Council have in mind for the Post Office Plaza overhaul that will change our town forever? Nobody knows.
They haven’t even revealed the options under consideration, and yet they expect us to discuss the five final options at a high stakes, mass public Town Hall meeting to be held in the next few weeks!
That’s something not even a professional town planner could do well.
The Mayor ought to reveal the options at this Monday’s Council meeting, so we can be prepared to discuss them at the Town Hall meeting he’s promised to hold before the end of March!
Instead, he’s planning to go into yet another back room session regarding mysterious negotiations with unknown parties.
We need to see those five options well before that special public meeting, so we’ll have a chance to evaluate them.
We need to know that among the options presented will be the one that’s best for Chatham: Satisfy our POP affordable housing quota by subsidizing 15 existing apartments. Make POP more attractive by landscaping and resurfacing the parking lot, and NOT selling, gifting, leasing, or otherwise disposing of any Borough land; or reducing the amount of free, open air, surface public parking; or building any kind of parking garage; or granting a PILOT tax break – or any other kind of corporate welfare. Why? https://chathamchoice.org/2022/02/our-little-town/
With the future of Chatham at stake, we need more than one such special public meeting, something our Mayor explicitly promised on 27 January 2020. (Start at minute 13:00.) https://vimeo.com/387823706?embedded=true&source=video_title&owner=40797229
Given the settlement our Mayor and Council approved on June 14, 2021, https://chathamchoice.org/2021/09/, it appears that we have only two real options:
Cave-in, and build a big commercial housing project – smaller perhaps, but similar to the Kushners’ 4-story, 118-rental-unit block that would increase density, choke our streets, rob us of our public parking lot, burden our schools, diminish our quality of life – and probably cost Chatham a bundle, while providing a mere 15 affordable units. https://chathamchoice.org/2022/01/is-this-what-you-want-for-chatham/ OR
Stand firm, and persuade Fair Share Housing to let us preserve our public parking lot and small town quality of life, while satisfying our POP affordable housing quota by subsidizing 15 existing apartments scattered around town. https://chathamchoice.org/2021/10/
Of course, the second option is far better for Chatham and for the newcomers. If we make this choice, they won’t be set aside, crammed between the Post Office and the railroad tracks. They’ll be our next-door-neighbors and an integral part of our community.
In return, we’ll be able satisfy our affordable housing obligations for POP, and gain a bit of diversity, without increasing our population, density, traffic congestion, or air pollution.
As such, if we choose the second option, we won’t need to worry about higher costs for police, schooling, fire fighting, public works, etc. We’ll pay only the difference between the market rent and the affordable rent set by law for those few units – a knowable amount – instead of gambling our future on a big housing complex, whose effect on our net revenues Chatham has never even tried to estimate!
Best of all, by choosing the second option, we’ll preserve our free public parking lot, and our chance to landscape it and add a park, a popular proposal suggested by community leader Fran Drew https://chathamchoice.org/2021/07/dont-sacrifice-chatham-to-the-big-developer/, instead of getting stuck with a White Elephant complex we won’t need as affordable housing law evolves.
How can you help insure that Chatham makes the right choice?
Before we take even one more step with Post Office Plaza, we need to know the costs and implications of each option, as our Mayor first promised in January 2020. (Minute 13) https://vimeo.com/387823706
We’d rather trim the Borough budget a bit – or even increase taxes a little – to subsidize existing apartments, than play Russian roulette with Chatham’s future.
We’re 100% behind the Mayor negotiating to subsidize existing apartments rather than building a new apartment project that will destroy our quality of life, and we are counting on the Council to support that, too.
When they come up for re-election, we will vote accordingly.
