Late last week there appeared on our Town website a brand new item in the list of Town entities whose agendas and minutes are tracked.
It is the 2023 minutes of our Council Zoning Subcommittee (ZSC). Seven of them appear, beginning with the January 2023 meeting and continuing through the August 25, 2023 meeting. They are all currently found if you Click Here and then at Group click Zoning Subcommitee.
Voices strongly encourages its readers to read each and every one of them as they display a wide variety of development projects which this group including 3 regular (and one alternate) Council members are considering. The projects are typically presented by a developer (rarely identified by name). This Zoning Subcommittee group to whom these projects are presented has the following characteristics:
1) No more than 3 Council members at any one time, else the ZSC would have to open its meetings to the public and follow other procedural steps required by the Open Public Meetings Act that our subcommittees do not follow.
2) A shifting cast of other attendees that seems now to include the town attorney and the new redevelopment attorney, the Town planner’s firm and a variety of administration officials (the Manager, the Deputy Manager, the Zoning Official [Mr. Melfi], the Construction Official [Mr. Boccino] and perhaps others. It may also sometimes include land use boards members.
3) Developers and/or developers’ attorneys whose attendance may or may not be limited to the period of time that they advocate or describe the development they support.
Nowhere as yet is there any of :
· The rules that govern publication of agendas for ZSC meetings,
· The criteria for and processes by which persons are invited to or excluded from these meetings.
· It is not clear what governs whether a subcommittee topic is sent – with or without a recommendation – to the entire Council in open or closed session.
· It is not clear what (and by what criteria) ZSC discussions are forwarded only to closed sessions of Council.
· Why are we residents not invited to attend those portions of the meeting that are not privileged?
(While there are state rules that govern the matters that must be dealt with in closed session, e.g. personnel and litigation, those matters are handled in closed session before the 8PM Council meetings on Tuesdays. Many of the people who are in attendance at the ZSC meetings (as noted by the minutes) are not Council members, Managers or their attorneys and would not be allowed to attend a closed Council session!
If they attend, why may the public not attend?
Even a cursory reading of the ZSC minutes will make it clear that what is discussed and who attends should be the matter of Workshop Sessions.
What we have said about the ZSC applies in part to other Council subcommittees, as Teaneck Voices has repeatedly stated.
Voices, to be sure, welcomes the publication of these ZSC minutes. They represent a small step in the direction of transparency. We note that once we began to dig these minutes out from where they were embedded in the Council agenda packets – and placed them on our Voices website - someone finally decided they also belonged on the Town website. However, their presence there was not publicized until now.
Transparency – and discerning what should be public and what should not be public - is a persistent challenge in a democracy. But it is a topic which should concern us all since it assuredly affects us all.
P.S. Teaneck Voices will continue to copy the minutes that the Town publishes and place them on our website (Click Here) Who knows when they will disappear as do old resolutions and ordinances?
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