SHARE:  


Why PILOTs - What are our Council Members Thinking?



PUBLISHED BY TEANECK VOICES

8/22/2023

Contents:


Why PILOTs - What are our Council Members Thinking

  • A Two-Part Tale


What to Expect/Question at the August 24 Planning Board


Does What Preceded the 189 The Plaza PILOT Matter?


This Week in Teaneck - August 22 to 27, 2023


Still Waiting - For Board of Adjustment Minutes


Announcements


TPS's Schools Parent Information Conferences - August 26


TPS's Sesiones de Informacion Para Padres - Agosto 26


Keep the Dream Alive - MLK Jr. - August 27


Meet & Greet Superintendent Spencer - September 28



Contacting Teaneck Voices

Why PILOTs - What are our

Councilmembers Thinking?

a 2-Part Tale

The topics discussed in this 2-part article are of critical importance to Teaneck residents. Teaneck Voices will continue to run articles on these topics – AINRs, PILOTs, and WORKSHOP MEETINGS for the 2 more issues until the next Council meeting on Tuesday, September 5, 2023 when the Council will vote on an Ordinance that will give/not give developer, Jonathan Vogel, a 30-year PILOT (Payment In Lieu of Taxes) for the apartment building at 189 The Plaza.


 Teaneck Voices will run some Letters to the Editor and Comments on these 3 topics. Please send letters and comments to teaneckvoices@gmail.com.


PART I --

Starting in 2006:    They said Teaneck needed revenues. They said we do not have a large commercial base in Teaneck and that’s why our property taxes were so high. They said we had to build tall, multifamily buildings, many-story parking garages, hotels, storage facilities and billboards in available places to bring in revenues.


Available places meant the abandoned Verizon building at 1500 Teaneck Road, the space at 1475 Palisade Ave. cheek by jowl with the CSX railroad, the old Holuba Soap Factory behind Herrick Park, 100 State Street, The World of Wings museum, The Marriott Employee Parking lot at Glenpointe, and others. But at least all these were done following the normal zoning and land use board procedures. Council went looking for a way to avoid such troublesome development rules.


Following a 9/6/2018 off-site Council retreat where Council learned about how redevelopment could free up the process, Council proposed and did at its 10/10/2018 meeting introduce an ordinance (25-2018 Click Here) that would have named the Council itself as the a new Teaneck redevelopment entity. But the public in G&W had responded very badly to that idea (Click Here) and Council itself became conflicted (Click Here). Believe it or not, neither that ordinance nor any similar one, has ever appeared on a Council agenda again.


But advised by Teaneck Planning Consultant Phillips Preiss LLC Council within the next month moved quietly to implement precisely what the 10/18 public opposition had forced it to drop.


It simply decided to act on what it could not agree to pass as an ordinance: “We, as the Town’s elected governing board can without ANY formal action simply begin to act as the Town’s authority to control redevelopment and as such Council can designate ANY area of Teaneck an Area In Need of Redevelopment (AINR) by having it examined to be ‘blighted” and getting the Planning Board to agree.’”


a blighted area is defined as an area with buildings or improvements which, by reason of dilapidation, obsolescence, overcrowding, faulty arrangement or design, lack of ventilation, light and sanitary facilities, excessive land coverage, deleterious land use or obsolete layout, or any combination of these or other factors, are detrimental to the safety, health, morals, or welfare of the community.


“And then the Council, can do whatever it wants with it – no need to follow existing zoning, no requirements, provide no basis for complaints. We can meet in closed sessions with any developer we want. And even better, once Council has defined an AINR, it can entice developers with lots located in the AINR by offering something called a Payment In Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) so for a reduced fee they are freed from paying the taxes that would normally be owed on property owned by a Teaneck resident. And guess what guys, we can give developers an even bigger incentive by extending that PILOT for 30 years!!"


And that is precisely what Council – beginning in November 2018 and continuing through 2022 – has done in the naming of 9 separate AINRs (some single lots but more recently large tracts of Township properties) and approving PILOTs once a lot has an approved redevelopment plan.


Huh????????


SO -- Teaneck residents were told they need tall, crowded, dense multifamily development to bring in tax revenues because our property taxes are so high.


BUT -- Teaneck Council is building tall, crowded, dense, multifamily development AND then giving away the tax revenues these developments normally would bring in. That is precisely the meaning of PILOTs


SO – Teaneck residents get dense, high-rise development AND the eventual need to assess higher taxes to service the added residents that those tax-protected PILOT projects bring in?

What’s going on here? And more importantly, who benefits?


Teaneck Voices is making no assumptions or accusations about who is benefitting from the PILOTs given and proposed. But there has to be a reason why the Teaneck Council which boasted for years how savings for the taxpayers was its major concern, is suddenly using a mechanism to “entice” developers at the expense of the existing and future taxpayer residents:


·       Residents of Teaneck have no idea WHY developers for the two massive building on Decatur Ave have been given a 30-year PILOT.


o  And neither does Council! Voices, through OPRA’s, can prove that no one – Council or the administration – ever reviewed the numbers the developer’s consultant provided to calculate either of these PILOTs. They each are giant giveaways.


·       At the last Council meeting on August 8, 2023 Council unanimously voted to introduce Ordinance 33-2023 giving developer Jonathan Vogel a 30-year PILOT for an AINR 6-story apartment building at 189 The Plaza. The second reading of the Ordinance and the promised unanimous passing of it is scheduled for the next Council meeting on September 5.


A unanimous vote by the present “new” Council includes the votes of the 3 elected RISE candidates who were chosen on a platform that promised no more AINRS. Are they ignoring their promises? (Click Here to review the electoral forum where all 2022 Council candidates discussed AINRs).


Aat the 8/8 meeting:


·       Deputy Mayor Gee explained that there were people without housing so therefore we should encourage the development of buildings like 189. The 2 examples she gave of families in need of housing cannot afford the rent in the AINR buildings (or for that matter in the other apartment buildings built in the last 2-3 years like One 500 Teaneck Road or 1475 Palisade Ave). The public deserves to know what she means when she says there are people who desperately need low or moderate cost housing so we should continue to build “luxury” housing even though these at-risk people you cite cannot benefit from it. Madame Deputy Mayor, you said it brings “balance.” Balance? Please explain.


·       The RISE Councilmembers were joined by Mayor Michael Pagan who made an uninterpretable statement to which a link was provided in last week’s Teaneck Voices. In his statement he said that he would vote for this 189 The Plaza PILOT ordinance but after this he would support no more AINRs. Mr. Mayor, why are you supporting this one?


PART II.

It is evident that all the important decisions referred to in Part I of this article were made out of the public’s hearing!

·       Why use AINRs?

·       Why are perfectly attractive, comfortable areas “blighted?”

·       Why give PILOTs?


And then we ask:


·       Why – new Council - are you breaking campaign policy commitments?


·       Why will the Mayor’s vote “yes” on 189 but he knows that he will vote for no others?


The public deserves to know.


How can that be accomplished?  WORKSHOP MEETINGS!  The Council will respond immediately that they have Work Session Items on every council agenda and those are supposed to be the equivalent of Workshop Meetings.


Look at a sample under the Council’s ordinance-defined Work Sessions: 

·       Miscellaneous

·       Old Business

·       New Business

·       Communications

·       Committee Reports by Council Liaisons

·       Council-listed Items

·       Township Manager’s Report

·       Township Attorney’s report


Then look at the council agenda of almost any other NJ municipality. Those items are part of the regular governing board meetings.


Workshop Sessions are not about ITEMS. Almost any item can be discussed at a workshop. Workshop Meetings are about a PROCESS. The process is the open discussion of items of importance to the public. In the past they included councilmembers sitting around a table set on the floor of the council chambers in front of the dais. With only a brief G&W, These meetings are not a time for the Council to hear from the public, but for the public to hear from the councilmembers as they talk to and debate with one another.


For example, apropos of this article, at a Workshop Meeting the councilmembers might have discussed Developer Vogel’s request for a 30-year PILOT. They might have collaboratively, in public, reviewed his financial statements to see whether or not he was requesting the PILOT because he financially could not afford to build otherwise. Do all the numbers add up to creating a benefit to the Town from a project on this lot – or only for the developer? Important issue for us to know.


Both Mayor Pagan and Deputy Mayor Gee could have shared their hesitancies with their council colleagues and the public, so we all could understand why they planned to vote yes on something much of the public was against as demonstrated repeatedly this Spring and Summer.


WITHOUT REAL WORKSHOP MEETINGS THE PUBLIC REMAINS IN THE DARK AND THE PROMISED TRANSPARENCY – OPENNESS OF INFORMATION TO THE PUBLIC – REMAINS AN UNFULFILLED CAMPAIGN PROMISE.


Teaneck Voices welcomes your Letters and Comments: teaneckvoices@gmail.com

What to Expect/Question at

the August 24 Planning Board Meeting

The Planning Board’s only August meeting is scheduled to be held in-person at 8:00 pm in Council Chambers with a simultaneous internet access (but not hybrid). The meeting is to be available on the internet (Click Here and enter passcode 337240) The agenda packet for the meeting is available at Click Here


Two issues will precede and follow the main agenda item – an initial one about signs at 381 Teaneck Road and as a final agenda item a presentation by the Board of Education to explain its plans for an addition to Bryant School. Both are well covered in the agenda packet.


But the primary purpose of this PB meeting is the Holy Name’s initial actual presentation of its site plan for a temporary gravel parking lot for 155 vehicles at the corner of Cedar Lane and Chadwick. 


(This site plan was first designated as 2022-13 in the PB agenda packet for the PB’s initial hearing on this and another site plan (2022-14) at the PB’s 10/27/2022 scheduled meeting. This 2022 site plan hearing has been carried with the permission of the applicant (Holy Name) for the ensuing 10+ months. 


The Public Notice of this next hearing was filed with the Record on July 21 for the PB meeting of 7/25, but at that meeting PB attorney Kelly announced that no additional notice to the public would be required before this 8/24 meeting. Residents interested in reviewing that public notice at it appeared in the Record should Click Here.


However, the Notice of Denial from the Zoning Officer (which, as always lays out how the proposed site plan requires variances from the governing ordinances) was last published on the Town website with the 10/27/2022 meeting agenda. ­Voices has retrieved that notice and published it on its website at (Click Here).


 It is important to note that this “Proposed” parking lot has been completed and approved under the state’s emergency authorizations during and following Covid.


As can be seen by a review of what the website agenda does publish this week about this site plan, both the Town’s planning consultants and its engineering/traffic consultants have raised a series of questions about this site plan. The most notable is to ask what does Holy Name mean by the term "temporary" and for how long should this parking lot (which clearly does not meet normal Town parking lot standards) be expected to last as it accommodates nearby hospital construction.


A second key issue is how does this parking lot address state storm water management provisions. The Stonefield letter raises this issue most sharply. Voices is unaware of any website posting of the HN submission in response to that stormwater issue. We have been able to obtain the title page to the Septewmber 2022 storm water management document produced by Lapatka Associates – but clearly the applicant will need an expert from the firm to address this important issue.

Does What Preceded the Proposed

PILOT for 189 The Plaza Matter?

Summary: Does a property whose very lot definition, owners and shifting valuations have been as fluid as are the various projects proposed for that property’s future use warrant special tax treatment now? Does it matter that all this shifting has actually been accelerating for the last 15 months. Is it instructive that over the 5-year period when all of these changes have been occurring no where until very recently have the developer/proponents made huge tax break a factor - let alone a condition - of their willingness/capacity actually to do what they have now proposed? Does it matter that these 189 The Plaza proposed tax-breaks (PILOTs) are an integral and incredibly expensive component of precisely the development mechanism (AINR's) that Teaneck residents have relentlessly and overwhelming (at the voting booth and in all recent public input opportunities) asked Council to halt or at least pause until we can define in a new Master Plan how and what we now want development to express about our Town? Voices thinks these factors - all of them - matter!


What decisions are Upcoming? The proposed Ordinance 33-2023 which calls for approval of a PILOT (Payment in Lieu of Taxation) agreement between the Township and 189 The Plaza Urban Renewal LLC was unanimously approved for introduction at Council’s 8/8/2023 meeting. It is scheduled to be the subject of a public hearing prior to a vote by Council either to adopt or not adopt that Ordinance on Tuesday September 5 early in the Council’s regular meeting on that date.


How did 189 The Plaza Become Eligible for a PILOT? Voices has begun research to understand why and how this 189 the Plaza property – which is part of am otherwise vibrant commercial AREA in the Township’s Plaza retail area - was made part the State Street AINR designation. An AINR designation under the state’s redevelopment statutes must first precede a property being eligible to be a lot be proposed for – and to have it granted – an approved redevelopment plan.

In turn, such a redevelopment plan approval adopted first by the Planning Board and subsequently by Council MUST PRECEDE a property's eligibility for being granted a PILOT (Payment in Lieu of Taxation) tax-break agreement with the Township.


As with all the lots included in the large tract of State Street properties that have been designated blighted and included in the State Street AINR, the recently-defined Block 5005 Lot 1.01 (aka 189 The Plaza) was evaluated by the Township’s Planner (Keenan Hughes) in preparation for the June 23, 2022 hearing scheduled with the Town’s Planning Board. Included in his analysis of the AINR’s designation (a designation actively contested at the time by many knowledgeable residents) Hughes wrote:

Hughes’ citation of the fact that no other private developer has come forward to develop the site skirts the fact that no opportunity for a different developer/owner to come forward was provided. In fact through a series of transactions resulting in shifting site valuation transactions (see below) between 2017 and 2020 - which may or may not have been among related parties (TBD) - the absence of any emergence of any private capital other than what was represented in these ownership shifts among LLC’s was preclusive of such emergence. 


The negative evaluation of the current uses of this property found in the second paragraph of Hughes’ evaluation is particularly interesting in that it rightly cites the current absence of effective use of this property to include mixed-use residential and retail as envisioned in both the Master Plan discussions and its consequent zoning. If, as Hughes suggests, these are material factors in his conclusion that 189 The Plaza meets criteria “d” that enables the lot to be designated blighted, then how does a new project that does NOT call for retail mixed-use (and the current redevelopment plan does not) qualify it as a project that will lift it from its blighted status – and thus warrant its being so beneficial to the town as to warrant its being given a PILOT.


Owners: The many recent (2017 to 2020) ownership transactions (available through the Town’s assessor’s office) indicate that 189 The Plaza became a single lot only following the transactions recorded in July of 2020 (in the depths of the pandemic). It was that transaction which apparently led the Town to treat the lot as a single lot only in tax year 2021. And yet the asserted value of the transactions which undoubtedly allowed that lot consolidation/redefinition have, paradoxically it is important to note, almost certainly been a basis for its property tax assessment. And yet that assessment has since led to unresolved tax appeals by the lot owners for all 3 subsequent years – appeals that currently are reputed to be in state tax court.  


What is the value of this property now – and what should form the basis of the calculations of the project’s completed value as compared to the service burdens that the Town must meet for the residents of its projected 48 residential units. Voices still wrestles to understand enough about the calculations to hazard any evaluation of the costs and benefits about which our Council claims (see the whereas clauses in introduced Ord 33-2023) to be so sure!


Projects In the midst of all these changes in ownership, a single person (Jonathan Vogel) has been identified as the representative with whom the many Township entities have dealt as proposals for project approvals have shifted almost as completely as have the lots’ definition and ownership. It is generally known that parallel to the ownership changes, applications for approvals for significantly different projects have been proposed beginning in 2018 (well before the lot was consolidated following July 2020). The initial 2018 proposal proposed to the Board of Adjustment WAS a mixed-use retail-residential project that called for 147 luxury units in a 15-story facility. Intense public criticism of the facility’s proposed height and size may have been responsible for that project’s withdrawal from the zoning board agenda.  


After a hiatus the Town received a revised project very much like the current proposed AINR one – no retail and 48-units, 4 stories of residential and parking in the lower two levels. The single October 2020 hearing for that project (which made no reference at all to the need for tax relief) readily won approval by the zoning board.


And then dead silence – or as Planner Hughes put it in June 2022, “the project has since stalled”.


But once the State Street AINR was designated and included this new lot, then within 2 months (by September 22) the Planner had submitted a nearly identical project now labeled a “redevelopment plan’ to the Planning Board. 21 days later (by October 13) the Planning Board had approved the redevelopment plan and 5 weeks later, Council did the same. Somewhere in this time frame discussions had been started – this time with Council only – on whether to provide the project a PILOT. From out of nowhere, came a redefined project that only now needs huge tax breaks to be viable?  


Is this a real step toward actually enabling a realistic project that will – at long, long last – benefit the Town?  Voices is more and more confident that no one knows enough about this project and its finances to make a 30-year commitment now to forego its regular taxes.


And this is especially important since granting the PILOT represents the most expensive step in the distrusted AINR process which Teaneck’s residents clearly believe the Town should not be entertaining/expediting NOW and perhaps ever!

This Week in Teaneck - August 22-27, 2023

Teaneck Board of Education Special Meeting – Wednesday, August 23, 2023 at 8:00 PM in Cheryl Miller-Porter Student Center at Teaneck High School and virtually via the Zoom link Click Here. Agenda will be available on Wednesday on the main page of the Schools website (Click Here).

 

Planning Board – Thursday, August 24, 2023 at 8:00 pm in person in the Council Chambers. The meeting is not hybrid but is to be available on the internet (Click Here and enter passcode 337240) The agenda packet for the meeting is available at Click Here.



·       There is an additional Voices article about this PB meeting in this edition – where additional information about the Holy Name site plan hearing may be found.

 

Teaneck Voices will update information about this week’s public meetings as it becomes available and those updates can be seen at Click Here


 

Still Waiting: Board of Adjustment Mtg. Minutes

Our troubled Township website needs a major redesign - but in the meantime we depend on it for information we can obtain nowhere else.


Case in Point: We have not had meeting minutes for Board of Adjustment meetings posted on the website since April 7, 2022.


During that 17-month period the Board has made MANY KEY DECISIONS. But the public has no way of knowing what they are and what is upcoming.


Voices has pressed both the Board and the Clerk's office to get this issue addressed. We have repeatedly been told it is for them - as it is for us - a priority. Priority matters do not take 1 & 1/2 years to correct!

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Where you can click to get more info and RSVP to the event: https://bit.ly/3KrfQAY

Por Mas Information und RSVP

Contacting Teaneck Voices


Co-Editors: Dr. Barbara Ley Toffler and Dr. Chuck Powers

By Email: teaneckvoices@gmail.com

By Phone: 201-214-4937

By USPS Mail: Teaneck Voices, PO Box 873. at 1673 Palisade Ave. 07666

Teaneck Voices' Website is www.teaneckvoices.com


Sign Up Now
Send a Comment
Submit an Article
Editorial Policies
LinkedIn Share This Email