Join the meeting by phone or Zoom: https://chathamborough.org/resident/calendar/3719
Check out the agenda:
Tag Archives: Kobylarz
Valentine’s Day hookup!
At the end of tonight’s Borough Council meeting, our Mayor and Council will be going behind closed doors for a far more intimate encounter – one that could determine the fate of Post Office Plaza.
Let’s just hope they don’t get taken advantage of, and wind up signing another Secret Agreement like the one below, which they approved behind closed doors last June 14 – all but giving away control of Post Office Plaza – and then kept under wraps for months!
Source: https://portal.njcourts.gov/webcivilcj/CIVILCaseJacketWeb/pages/publicAccessDisclaimer.faces
(To see court files, hit link above, prove you’re not a robot, use dropdown to select Civil, Morris, enter 1906, enter 15.)
Would our Mayor and Council really do that again? Ask them at the meeting tonight 7:30 pm, by phone or Zoom:
https://chathamborough.org/component/dpcalendar/event/2385
What’s next for Post Office Plaza?
With the Kushner partnership’s exclusive contract for Post Office Plaza set to expire on Jan 26, will our Mayor and Council decide to:
- accept the Kushners’ vision for Post Office Plaza, most recently this: https://chathamchoice.org/2022/01/is-this-what-you-want-for-chatham/; or
- give the Kushner partnership yet another extension of time (their sixth!) to come up with a decent design for Post Office Plaza; or
- let the Kushners’ exclusive contract expire – and give someone else a chance to design something that might suit us – instead of swamping our roads, schools, police and fire departments, and destroying our quality of life in Chatham Borough?
Which way will the Mayor and Council decide to go? To find out, tune in this Monday, Jan 24, at 7:30 pm using this link:
https://chathamborough.org/component/dpcalendar/event/2384
Meanwhile, should be some clues in the agenda for Monday’s Council meeting, which you can find here: https://granicus_production_attachments.s3.amazonaws.com/chathamborough/b7ca7e731a8f47808f7aa8cb8d3cf63d0.pdf
or by going to the Borough’s homepage and scrolling all the way down to Granicus: https://chathamborough.org/
The Invasion of Chatham Begins
Mr. Mayor, we’re counting on you to do your best for Chatham. Remember what you wrote in 2016:
… should a multistory garage and transit village (with four-story, multi-unit buildings) be built in this area, an additional downside could certainly materialize… namely a diminution in property values.
Many Chatham homeowners first moved here because of the borough’s arboreal character and wide-open spaces…
… the last thing a recent arrival from, say, Queens, New York, Jersey City, or South Orange might want to see are the aforementioned urban or quasi-urban communities following them to quiet and leafy suburban Chatham Borough.
An important factor in the valuation of so many residential properties here is precisely this quiet, leafy character of our charming suburban community. If this were to change in as dramatic a fashion… this pillar of the borough’s high property values might quickly dissolve…
… borough residents will now have to be vigilant on a case-by-case basis that such “visions and goals” do not indeed become fact.
Equally problematic are the potential tax increase implications accompanying all of the newly permitted construction. In particular, multistory parking garages are expensive to build and Chatham Borough taxpayers would ultimately foot the bill, regardless of the manner in which this project is financed…
These potential changes represent the worst sort of overdevelopment, one that would decidedly transform our charming little arboreal hamlet into something more nearly resembling the less suburban places from whence many of us first came to Chatham Borough…
…the new master plan creates the conceptual and legal room for a creeping urbanization in Chatham Borough. It portends the arrival of deep-pocketed developers who care nothing for the investment, financial or otherwise, so many of its residents have made in the purchase and maintenance of their homes, and the living of their lives, in this picturesque small New Jersey town.
…when these developers do arrive, they will be accompanied by their teams of highly-paid lawyers as they seek the Borough Council’s approval for their proposed redevelopment projects.
This will be a fundamentally asymmetric situation in terms of available resources to fight these projects, since individual Chatham homeowners will be hard-pressed to match the developers in terms of required legal fees. It will, in other words, be a David versus Goliath-like proposition for many Borough residents…
… the Planning Board’s vote in favor of the new master plan… has let the proverbial genie out of the bottle… it provides a policy foundation and framework for the borough’s land use laws and building regulations…
Heard about the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?
It doesn’t exist. Not even in Post Office Plaza. The sooner we realize that the better off we’ll be.
Check out this piece by a neighbor who knows what he’s talking about:
What you can do
Q: Is there any way to dissuade our Mayor & Council from building a big, 100+ commercial, rental apartment block behind our Main Street Post Office, clogging up our streets with hundreds more cars?
Come to the Council Meeting Tonight
Tuesday, Oct. 12, 7:30 pm,
Borough Hall, upper level, 54 Fairmount Avenue.
To attend virtually: see www.chathamborough.org. Scroll “News and Events” down to “Notice of Mayor & Council Meeting.” Click “more.”
Q: Discouraged by the Mayor’s 25-person limit on in-person attendance? Fed up with the technical difficulties that plague virtual participation?
Tell the Mayor
to hold Council meetings in a place
that can accommodate everyone.
Email:[email protected] cc [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected]
Council member Jocelyn Mathiasen calls our flyer “highly inaccurate.”
Our Mayor calls it “false and erroneous.”
So why hasn’t either one cited a single error in the flyer?
Here we go again!
Myth: Our Mayor and Borough Council wouldn’t plop a giant apartment block in the middle of town without first airing some options.
Reality: Behind the scenes, they’ve already sacrificed our options. Now they’re all but bound to :
- build a 100+ rental unit, high density apartment block that will
- put hundreds more cars on Main Street and
- replace our free, open Post Office Parking Lot with a dangerous, multilevel parking garage.
Don’t wait until it’s too late.
Get the facts.
Come to the next Borough Council meeting:
Monday, 13 September 2021
7:30 pm
Chatham Borough Hall, 3d floor
54 Fairmount Avenue
Would you like to see even more traffic in Chatham Borough?
How about a dangerous, hulking parking garage?
less open, public parking?
More empty storefronts?
More crowded schools?
Rising taxes for police, firefighters, water, sewer, etc?
Lower property values?
That’s exactly what you can expect
if our borough Council lets the Kushner real estate developers
build a corporate welfare, commercial apartment/retail project
behind our Main Street Post Office.
Get the facts before it’s too late!
Come to the next Borough Council meeting:
7:30 pm
Chatham Borough Hall, 3d floor
54 Fairmount Avenue