Significant meetings – the final ones of 2023 - of three key Township public agencies occurred last week (December 11-15). Only one – the 12/14 meeting of the Planning Board really went well. The least successful was Council’s 12/12 meeting which failed in what Council itself did to itself and relatedly what went on in Good & Welfare. The agenda items at the 12/13 Board of Education meeting were all addressed competently but the public input session was rancorous and eventually had to be shut down.
Teaneck is a town tenuously struggling to maintain even a modicum of peace as it awaits 2024. Major challenges for a variety of very different reasons now face each of these three public bodies. In this lead Voices article we want to encourage our readers to become familiar with what happened last week and why 2024 will test the competence and even decorum of each.
Planning Board: We begin with the Planning Board which on Thursday the 14th finally held the hearing on the Holy Name Medical Center’s (HNMC) second site plan that had been on hold for much of 2022 and 2023. It had awaited this summer’s settlement of litigation focused primarily on legal efforts to limit Holy Name’s current expansion into its neighbor’s residential neighborhoods. The site plan unanimously approved by the PB on Thursday allows - with stipulations - HNMC to construct, for 3 years, a temporary lot with 164 parking spaces part of which will at times serve as a staging area for construction of the previously approved HNMC day care facility. Hence the long struggle over the nature, extent and limits of HNMC expansion is apparently resolved. This final PB site plan hearing is available on video at Click Here.
But one resident at the PB meeting’s close reminded the Board of what lies ahead for it in 2024: The PB is the sole town institution ultimately responsible for approving the new Master Plan. The initial draft of that document is currently being authored by Town Planner Hughes. He has reportedly forecast draft completion by early Spring. But as residents who weathered the Master Plan approval process in 2006-7 (17 years ago) know well, the first draft will likely not be the last.
Council appears to have reached an informal agreement not to move forward with additional redevelopment (AINR) steps until the new MP is approved and it is unclear whether that agreement applies to all land use policy approvals. But as all Township observers know, the Master Plan struggle will surely become spirited when we must decide what policies and approaches and principles should guide what the Town does with its limited available geography.
Teaneck is, after all, a Town whose then Master Plan as early as 1979 had declared itself to be “essentially a fully developed community” (Click Here p. p.3). Our readers may want to check out the growing literature on past and current MP inputs (Click Here). But there is an additional new document – a Planner’s summary of the November 20 public forum focused on the American Legion Drive area. The Planner’s summary document from that meeting is (unfortunately) only found embedded in the Council’s most recent agenda packet (Click Here on pp. 22-38). In Voices opinion, this document tells us less about what the attending residents said and more about what Planner Hughes himself is thinking we should want.
Stay tuned in early 2024 for a Planning Board that has recently been functioning well but may now encounter a Town and its leadership very deeply divided on all Master Plan policy and development matters.
The Board of Education: Its 12/13 meeting featured discussion of 1) the District’s new Social and Emotional Learning Framework (Click Here & go to Min 4&38sec. of the video); 2) the excellent scholarship record of its successful 2023 football team (Click Here & go to Min 24 ff.) and 3) discussion of the revised and expanding agreement with Bergen County Community College to allow 11th & 12 grade Teaneck students to count courses toward both high school and college associate degree credit. That discussion included useful information about how a program beginning with 9th grade students will prepare a broader group of high school scholars to enter that college associates degree program in their final two years (Click Here & go to hr2&7min of the video).
Unfortunately the extended “public comment” session of the meeting (beginning at Click Here & go to Min 47 of the video) which initially had provided a variety of very insightful resident comments deteriorated so badly that this public input portion had to be discontinued after an hour and fifteen minutes.
This 12/13 BOE regular meeting was its last truly public one prior to the Board’s reorganization meeting scheduled for January 3, 2023. On January 3 members, newly-elected in November, will be sworn into this 9-member board. How this newly-constituted Board will operate and whether any change of direction on educational policy should be expected is very uncertain at the moment. (Note: the current BOE has just added a special meeting – a closed session one on the 12/21 - to address personnel matters).
Teaneck Council’s final 2023 meeting on 12/12 lasted 5+ hours. It began well with a presentation of useful information about the process to be used to make 16 of the 78 new Townhouses being built on the old Holuba site (520 Palisade) available for purchase by persons/families who are "affordable-housing eligible".
Unfortunately, the audio for the Town’s video for this presentation is flawed. Of the 3 versions of that video now on the internet the best for hearing most of this presentation about the process and criteria for selecting owners of these affordable townhouses is the video found on the Town’s You Tube site (Click Here and move the cursor to where the audio kicks in at minute 4). Voices believes that for every other part of that Council video after minute 6 , the version on the website (Click Here) is OK.
The Council meeting’s agenda was full and substantive. Council had in its November meeting approved the nomination of 35 residents to fill many of the vacancies for 10 Town advisory boards. 3 residents had simultaneously been nominated as their board’s chairs. Separate Council resolutions were placed in the consent agenda for each of these 35 nominations and were then adopted in the consent agenda.
Additionally, Council passed a storm water control ordinance (42-2023) to regulate privately-owned salt storage facilities. At the end of the meeting Council easily approved the introduction of an ordinance (43-2023) increasing the size of the Senior Citizen’s Advisory Board and a revised version of an ordinance (now 45-2023) to approve and regulate Accessory Dwelling Units (ADU’s) in specified residential neighborhoods. (This is the ordinance that the PB had recommended be improved to address specific Teaneck housing and zoning issues).
Council also approved without discussion the resolution that approves a contract with the firm that will revise the Township website. The required hearing prior to the Town submitting a Green Acres application to fund the Sagamore Park upgrade took a total of 16 minutes.
In other words, Council got done a huge amount of diverse Town business in the course of about 30 minutes.
But, as noted the meeting lasted more than 5 hours. And except for a few comments in G&W, none of that entire time was devoted to “development” issues.
To be sure, fully 2 hours of the time was devoted to hearing the 63 persons who spoke in Good & Welfare (Click Here for the website video and G&W starts at hr2&16min). Anyone who had thought that as the Mideast struggle continues “peace and unity” had been restored in Teaneck should take the time (two hours) to hear the Town’s G&W anguish.
But that still leaves us about two more hours of Council “discourse” – and most of that time was devoted to three issues, none of which were, in Voices view, adequately resolved. We will briefly introduce our readers to what we know about each and promise that in the time before the next Council meeting on January 9 we will have done research to allow a much better understanding of each:
Monuments on the Green: When the Tuesday 12/12 Council agenda was first published on Thursday 12/7 there was a resolution 362-2023 (Click Here and go to pp. 450-455) that would approve “the parameters for” (but not the location of) a Holocaust Memorial Wall on the Volcker Town Green. And, according to the resolution-referenced plans in the meeting's agenda packet, the project would include a circle of benches facing the wall. The Wall itself is, in the resolution, defined as “approximately 30 feet wide, and between 6 feet, 6 inches to 10 feet high”. Resident Steven Fox spoke in favor of Resolution 362 during a presentation at the outset of the meeting.
On the afternoon of Monday 12/11, (about 24 hours before Council) a second and separate resolution (367-2023 at Click Here pp. 538) suddenly appeared on the Council agenda. It was to approve “parameters for an Enslaved African Memorial” on the Volcker Green. Its language tracked identically with Resolution 362-2023 except it actually provided no parameters or plan whatsoever. Ms. Patricia Butler spoke in support of this Resolution 367-2023 at the Council meeting’s outset and had a slide with a drawing of a possible monument but no sizes or location.
· (By policy, all Council resolutions are required to be placed on the Council agenda on the Thursday before a Tuesday Council meeting. Only agenda items responding to true emergencies are to be allowed later. This policy is regularly ignored leaving both Council and residents unsure as to what Council will address)
Neither of these two 12/12/2023 Memorial resolutions made any reference whatsoever to the other one. And yet Council had on March 22, 2016 unanimously embraced a Planner’s plan/memo specifying specific parameters and locations for 4 Volcker Green Memorials - precursor to a real Teaneck Garden to Nurture Human Understanding to fully reflect its diversity.
· In this 2016 plan, the height of the tallest memorial was to be four feet! The Resolution 62-2016 (Click Here) which accompanied this 2016 “parameters memo” won universal agreement and support. (Click Here for the minutes describing Council’s 3/22/2016 discussion including explicit verbalized support for the collaborative plan by both Mr. Fox and Ms. Butler.)
· This joint effort continued through October 20, 2020 when Council witnessed the signing by Ms. Butler and Mr. Fox of a Memo of Understanding (MOU) of mutual aid and support of the organizations jointly seeking just these two memorials. (Click Here for the video of that signing beginning at 3min&20 sec). Substantial State grants were now flowing annually to support the project.
· In last week Council’s discussion about these two memorial resolutions, CM Gee raised questions about the status and distribution of literally hundreds of thousands of $ of state grants made to the Township to support the original collaborative plan for these memorials.
Did the funders' know Teaneck was ending the joint venture they had funded?
In the end Council, by a vote of 5-2, did last week approve both resolution 262-2023 and 267-2023 after complicated procedural maneuvers prevailed.
Clearly the history of this project – how it had first come together, had been legally united, had received public funding for the combined efforts and then suddenly in the Fall of 2023 had come apart – all needs further clarification. Voices has begun research to understand these recent developments, what resources have actually been devoted to the memorials’ creation and to better understand what has happened with the State’s grants. It has OPRA’d a copy of the 2020 MOU.
Voices readers who want to review what has just transpired about Volcker Green memorials on 12/12 of this year will need to track the many discussions about it that occurred throughout the long meeting (Council video. Click Here).
Nominating Chairs of Two Key Advisory Boards. Throughout 2023 there has been discussion/debate about the appointment process for the various boards, commissions and committees that Council is authorized to appoint. In these discussions the roles, authorities, openness and procedures of Council’s Personnel Subcommittee have been repeatedly debated.
In part, as new Township Attorney Salmon has explained, the problem has been exacerbated by the ambiguous and nearly contradictory language found in the Town Code about the two step process which, after the personnel subcommittee recommends specific nominees for specific vacancies, 1) Council hears in public session from the subcommittee and votes on whether or not a majority of Council supports the subcommittee recommended nominees or other nominees for the vacancy; and 2) Council in a subsequent public meeting then ratifies that nomination in a resolution that typically appears in the consent agenda.
Not surprisingly what constitutes the appropriate balance and competence of various boards and who should lead them has led to many close votes and maneuvers.
Early in Council’s 12/12 meeting, Personnel Subcommittee Chair Gee did, as she had frequently done before, nominated still another group of potential advisory board members and notably co-chairs for the important a) Advisory Board on Community Relations (ABCR - whose prior chair had in October resigned in protest) and b) the Parks, Playgrounds and Recreation (PPRAB) Board whose current chair is not being nominated for another term.
The subcommittee-proposed co-chairs for the PPRAB were both already members of that advisory board. And the PPRAB co-chairs nominations recommendation were readily approved.
Not so with the ABCR co-chairs. In the end, Council declined to support the subcommittee’s recommendation for the ABCR co-chairs and 5 of the 7 members supported another nominee. The fissures that had so clearly opened up in October, and continued in November were now playing themselves out in full public view and the subsequent Good & Welfare session mirrored the Council debate.
And it’s not over yet. The names of the nominees for the chairs of these two boards now will need to show up in resolutions for their actual chair appointments in January. And the task of filling the remaining advisory board vacancies lies ahead. Unfortunately, that process will continue to labor under the confusions created by the current Town code because….
An Ordinance to Clarify Code Appointment Chaos was Tabled: On the 12/12 agenda was a 93-page long Ordinance proposed for introduction. Its title said it was TO MODERNIZE AND CLARIFY THE TOWNSHIP CHARTER/ ADMINISTRATIVE CODE and it was identified as Ord 44-2023 (Click Here – and go to p. 613ff) . What propelled the effort? As discussed, some parts of the existing incoherent code have badly troubled and confused Council especially whenever it tries to make Council appointments.
How can the process be simplified and made more understandable or even transparent? Amend the code! But inherent in how the code will be re-written are serious issues about which the Council is divided – and not always just along “ideological” lines. For example:
· Should every resident who wants to apply for membership on an advisory board be given an interview?
· Should personnel subcommittee meetings – and interviews – be open to the public?
So last Tuesday what did Council decide about these issues? Well, nothing got clarified since as the clock approached 1:00 AM Council simply decided to table the proposed ordinance 44-4023 and send it back to the attorney for another shot.
Voices points out that as boring as it might seem, reading through this “code clarification” ordinance would be an extraordinary way to learn about how Teaneck says it wants to govern itself and to find out if there are some pieces of its code that you think would help us do that governing better.
A final comment. The five hours of Council meeting on Tuesday December 12 were excruciating. Not only did those hours not help improve relationships among our diverse residents but the tensions exposed have also made Council’s task of governing effectively in 2024 more difficult. Surely former Councilman Pruitt is right (see below) about the importance of the challenge Council faces.
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