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:
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
The Mayor has agreed to postpone the first Town Hall meeting to March 30, 7:30 pm in the Middle School auditorium. For details, tap this link:
That’s a good start.
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:
https://chathamchoice.org/2021/07/
Unless we support it, we’re liable to wind up with something like this:
It’s no wonder the redevelopers have proposed such horribly tin-eared designs for Chatham’s Post Office Plaza.
They’re taking their cues from an unreliable source that would sacrifice quaint Chatham to crippling overdevelopment.
Just look at the models shown at page 51 of our POP Redevelopment Plan:
Imagine the traffic! Is that what you want for Chatham?
Tell our Mayor and Borough Council right now! https://chathamborough.org/government/mayor
Tell them you prefer something like this:
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.
Check out the agenda: https://d3n9y02raazwpg.cloudfront.net/chathamborough/d2d94dd7-6822-11ec-85e3-0050569183fa-913d29f1-6f3f-49bb-ae95-b01c193418d6-1647030868.pdf
Please tell the Mayor and Council that it’s time for transparency: (Contact info at: https://chathamborough.org/government/mayor)
Come to the Council meeting this Monday, March 14, 7:30 pm:
Our Mayor promises he’ll soon hold a special public meeting to lay out five options for Post Office Plaza – which the Council will then vote on at one of its regular Monday night meetings. (Start at minute 6:24.) https://chathamborough.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=1&clip_id=75
That isn’t good enough. Now is the time to fix it.
Go to https://chathamborough.org/government/mayor.
E-mail the Mayor and Council:
Can we count on Chatham Borough Mayor Thad Kobylarz to protect us from over development that would destroy our little town?
Find out at the Monday Feb 28 Borough Council meeting, where the Mayor says he hopes to have news on Post Office Plaza. https://patch.com/new-jersey/chatham/post-office-plaza-redevelopment-update-expected-chatham.
(The meeting is 7:30 pm at Borough Hall, 54 Fairmount Avenue, upper level, or you can attend virtually here: https://www.chathamborough.org/component/dpcalendar/event/2386)
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:
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 the Feb 28 Council meeting, email the Mayor and Borough Council https://chathamborough.org/government/mayor.
Tell them that:
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
With the Kushner partnership’s exclusive contract for Post Office Plaza set to expire on Jan 26, will our Mayor and Council decide to:
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/
