Teaneck ‘s Long-standing and Continuing Struggle with Green Acres about completeness of its ROSI
Through most of 2010, Teaneck and Green Acres engaged in an intense and combative correspondence about what should be included on Teaneck’s Recreation and Open Space Inventory. By that November, the two sides had tired of their “ROSI” struggle.
The Town’s leadership - then as now - sought to restrict the number and scope of such protected properties. Its staff and attorneys continuously contested Green Acres' assertion that prior Teaneck Councils had agreed to protect the disputed properties when the Town accepted donations of property with “park only” deed restrictions, or signed agreements with Green Acres to receive partial funding to help purchase properties that the Town agreed should be protected parkland.
However, in 2010, Teaneck officials were very eager to receive the $750K Green Acres had conditionally agreed to provide for the Sportsplex only if the two sides could agree on the ROSI list.
On November 3, 2010, two Green Acres staff with ROSI decision authority traveled up from Trenton to Teaneck to visit some of the contested properties and negotiate ROSI property inclusions with then Manager Broughton, Attorney Rupp and Engineer McKearnin.
AND IT WORKED. Within three weeks of that meeting, Green Acre’s Nancy Lawrence wrote an email to the Town saying the State was ready to settle – with one important stipulation: that the Town forward to Green Acres a specific document that Teaneck staff had orally described during the 11/3 negotiation.
To quote Ms. Lawrence’s email:
"Besides the ROSI, we will eventually need documentation to support the fact that while the greenways along Route 4 are there to provide aesthetics and buffer the surrounding community from the traffic of this roadway and the development of roadside commerce, the 1956 (not entirely sure of this date) Master Plan noted that the Township must permanently protect this road as a highspeed thoroughfare - assuming the Master Plan and the Township's position has not since changed."
However, Green Acres staff report that the needed/requested copy of the 1956 Master Plan has never arrived. It did not arrive for good reason: The cited 1956 Master Plan never existed.
In 1983, the Town’s Planning Board Clerk, Geraldine Ryan, searched for that cited Master Plan. Here is what she reported back to that Planning Board in April, 1983:
“I read further through Minute of 1958. At no point was [the]…report accepted as a new “Master Plan…I therefore have to assume that there was no official “Master Plan” adopted between 1933 and 1963…”
But the Votee Sportsplex was top priority. So the Township finally submitted a ROSI Declaration which Manager Broughton and PB Chair Bodner signed on 1/6/2011.
Green Acres accepted that ROSI Declaration and checks for the Sportsplex’s 2007 project request finally arrived and were publicly celebrated on 12/15/2015. (
Click Here at minute 10 on Council video. That enlarged Green Acres check you see was the very last check Green Acres sent Teaneck.)
So what is the confusion about the Route 4 Greenbelt?
Teaneck’s 2011 ROSI Declaration included only the 4 acres of parkland on the western end of both sides of Route 4 with 3 ROSI-recognized parks at Belle Avenue.
But in 1966, the Town told the State that many, many more properties - large and small and contiguous to Route 4 – were parks.
Why the disconnect? In 1966, Teaneck’s Council and staff began extended discussions and negotiations with Green Acres staff about the status of properties along Route 4, like the wooded property that lay to the east of the law offices of Siegel & Siegel beside Route 4 East. Those negotiations resulted in an extensive list of Teaneck properties, identified by Block and Lot on the tax map of Teaneck, that dwarfs the list Teaneck has declared in its recent ROSI inventories.
Did Teaneck actually agree with Green Acres that all of those properties are protected in perpetuity?
Teaneck Voices investigators have reviewed Green Acres archives and seen the impressive 3-panel map which Teaneck’s Clerk sent to Green Acres on 3/17/1966. That map clearly delineates many properties on both sides of Route 4 and delineates very many more protected properties in Teaneck than Teaneck’s current ROSI identifies.
All of the 1966 documents are now reproduced in Appendix H of the revised 2019 draft OSRP found now on the Town website in the recent documents section at the bottom of
Click Here.
And, as far as the staff of Green Acres is concerned, the matter is now fully resolved at their end.
And, in fact, it was specifically addressed in an email sent by the Green Acres official in charge of Bergen County Green Acres compliance, Maude Snyder, to Manager Broughton in mid-July 2017.
That email tells Teaneck that in 1966 the Teaneck Council and Mayor sent proof of having passed a May, 1966 ordinance (#1279) that protected not just a large number of Greenbelt properties and others but was followed by a December 1966 agreement wherein, in exchange for funding a new open space property, the Town promised to permanently protect all the conservation/recreation properties it has identified to Green Acres.
In sum, Teaneck’s Planning Board is not now first being asked to volunteer random additional protected properties not currently found on its ROSI. Instead, there are many properties that are legally documented as already belonging on the ROSI. They must be included whenever Teaneck again seeks funding. Until that reconciliation occurs, Teaneck annually misses out on access to Green Acres funding which in 2022 is scheduled to total $200M.