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Teaneck Manager Kazinci Retires


PUBLISHED BY TEANECK VOICES

3/25/2024

Contents:

  • Teaneck Manager Kazinci to retire July 1st
  • 2024 Municipal Budget – Do Residents Care?
  • Master Plan: “Almost Done”?  or Not Yet Started?
  • Opinion: Is More Empathy Enough to Heal this Town? 
  • This Week in Teaneck
  • Follow-up on Recent Issues
  • Announcements



This Week in Teaneck - 3/25 to 3/31

  • Stigma Free Advisory Board
  • Hackensack River Greenway Advisory Board
  • American Legion Drive Update Public Meeting
  • Shade Tree Advisory Board
  • Teaneck Council Budget Meeting
  • Planning Board

Manager Kazinci to Retire July 1st

The Manager’s report on March 19th listed an impressive group of projects Teaneck Manager Kazinci is guiding toward initiation or completion. But it concluded with the Manager’s firm announcement that Manager Dean Kazinci had hours earlier formally submitted his resignation notice to Council to occur as of July 1st, 2024. A stunned Chambers audience instantly rose to give a sustained standing ovation to this 40-year public servant who had lately guided the Township through many challenges, none greater than his management of the Town as it weathered the severe COVID pandemic of 2020 to 2022. 



The Manager promised on Tuesday more discussion of this decision in the 3 months before he leaves. But the reality of it was solidified – if almost unnoticed - with Council’s undiscussed passage of the two resolutions which appeared on the Town website during the day on March 21st. The Council with Resolution 97-2024 unanimously approved giving a contract for executive search services to help the Council select and then recruit a new manager to the Canning Group LLC of Morristown. Readers may want to review the firm’s website at Click Here. It is speculated that the firm was recommended to Council by the retiring manager himself.

The Teaneck 2024 Municipal Budget

If public commentary to the Council about the 2024 municipal budget is any indication, there is virtually no resident interest in what Teaneck’s municipal government plans to spend this year. As Teaneck Voices reported last week (Click Here) the planned municipal budget increase has finally had to yield to reflect the national inflation situation that Council had so long denied. 


Astonishingly, in the three Council meetings where the budget has either been the main topic or available for citizen review, there have been few resident comments. In fact, only two residents made statements: one in favor of a capital expenditure to build a new Garden Club facility and a statement in support of the proposed library budget. One other resident citing speeding in areas where her grandchildren walk asked that specific speed controls be added wherever in the budget such expenses would be included.  


To be sure, the budget season started with uncertainty. The initial Council budget meeting (scheduled for March 7th) was called off with no explanation. No one either in person or on Zoom spoke at Good & Welfare at the first – March 14th - budget meeting where the Manager’s budget was presented. In 3 ½ hours of G&W on the regular March 19th Council meeting not one speaker cited the budget. The two statements cited above occurred on March 21st. There is but one more scheduled budget meeting – this coming Thursday the 28th. 


Surely part of this lack of public comment can be attributed to the difficulty most residents have in locating budget information on the Arcane Township website.  The Manager’s presentation has been there since March 15th but the 2024 Budget Book – where readers can go to find out what is planned this year as compared to last for specific departmental budgets – did not get to the website until just hours before the March 21st meeting. 


Here is a quick clickable guide to both the Manager’s Presentation and the Budget Book:


Click Here to see the Manager’s Presentation

Click Here to get access to the 210-page Budget Book


If that 210 pages seems like too much to wade through, know that a useful summary of 2023 vs 2024 planned revenue & expenses is on pp. 5-6; the costs of departmental salaries and overtime can be found on pp. 14-15; and the proposed capital expenditures (dramatically reduced from prior planned levels and projects are outline on pp. 189ff).

 

In case readers want to see the very useful dialogue Council and the Manager had on police and fire expenses and their consequence for staffing levels, go to the video of the March 21 meeting Click Here and move the cursor to min 19ff.

New Master Plan: “Almost Done” or Just About to Begin?

Summary:


The Mayor publicly announced this week that the new Master Plan is “almost done”. The process by which a new Teaneck Master Plan is to be developed, vetted with the public, and approved legally belongs to the Planning Board. The Town’s current Master Plan process - which for more than a year has not been managed by the Planning Board itself - may already be illegal.  Voices believes the never-authorized “Master Plan Steering Committee” and the Council’s Zoning Subcommittee must now hand over the Master Plan process to the Planning Board. Instead, Teaneck appears instead to be doing Areas in Need of Redevelopment (AINR) business again!

The State’s Municipal Land Use Law (MLUL) has for more than 100 years served as a guide to how the state’s many municipalities are to plan for and guide and decide how the land within municipal jurisdictions is to be planned and implemented. It is this law that defines what is to be included in a municipality’s Master Plan, how often a municipality should revise or develop a new one – and most importantly, what entity within municipalities that have Planning Boards should “prepare and, after public hearing, adopt or amend a master plan master plan” and do so “in a manner which protects public health and safety and promotes the general welfare”.  (NJSA C. 40-55D-28 Master Plan; Preparation; Contents; Modification) 


Those of our readers who were residents active in the Township’s civic life in 2006-7 will remember the long nights they and hundreds of their neighbors spent in the Teaneck High School Auditorium sorting out what should be included in the 2007 Teaneck Master Plan – and most specifically what should be the document’s Goals and Objectives.  There was no question as to what entity should call those meetings and who ultimately would decide what was to be included.  It was (and is) the Planning Board – all the members of which (except one) eventually signed the 2007 MP that for 17 years has been Teaneck’s Master Plan. That an effective consensus was achieved in 2007 was all the more remarkable since the planning firm (Birdsall Engineering) then serving as a consultant to the Planning Board on the MP was very controversial – indeed its principals were soon to be convicted of serious pay-to-play violations and it went bankrupt.


Virtually every decision about land use in Teaneck must be found to be consistent with that Master Plan until a new one – consistent with the MLUL - is approved. That means that only decisions consistent with any existing Master Plan– whether made by Council (on, for example, zoning), the Board of Adjustment (the entity which can decide if a specific zone can be “adjusted” to accommodate a special condition) or even any decision by the Planning Board itself - are legal and legitimate.  Consistency with the Master Plan rules! 


In Teaneck’s 2022 election (we believe all would agree) the civic debate about land use was the predominant issue.  And that meant prioritizing the development of a new Master Plan. The Spring 2023’s focus on making changes in governing and personnel in various Town entities – led to Council’s much-discussed (never acted upon) decision to freeze further action on the Areas in Need of Redevelopment (AINR) process – until the passage of a new Master Plan. Also much discussed and effectively operative by July was an entity named the Master Plan Steering Committee and the Council’s decision to include in the contract with the Town Planning firm (Phillips, Preiss) Master Plan preparation. That Steering Committee was never approved in any action by the Planning Board – and no official action about the Steering Committee was ever taken by Council, either


Several town meetings later – including October 5th, 2023 – the senior Phillips/Preiss Planner, firm Principal Keenan Hughes had been lead author for several summaries of the view of Teaneck residents (Click Here on the website and scroll to Community Meeting summaries). But then all communication with the public ended – and for now more than 5 months have passed since the public has received any communication or been consulted. 


And most importantly, two new developments have emerged.  There is now, apparently, a draft completed on March 20th of the full proposed new MP.  But it has been seen – and is being reviewed - only by the Steering Committee not by the full Planning Board. That draft has been prepared by a Hughes junior colleague, Spach Trajan. Principal Hughes no longer works on the Teaneck contract. 


And despite consistent efforts by Teaneck Voices to seek clarification of the roles of those currently managing the Master Plan process, Teaneck’s officialdom with whom we are in contact and who have promised to seek clarification of these matters have explained that they first have other priorities.


No mention of a Master Plan community meeting or the statutorily required opportunity for public input on the Master Plan is being made by any entity or official. 


Meanwhile, the Council Zoning Subcommittee has called a Thursday, March 27th Rodda Gym Community Meeting to “Hear Updates” on precisely the AINR projects that were supposedly not going to move forward, specifically the American Legion Drive and Garrison Avenue proposals. The AINR “updates” are apparently to be made by the conditional developer (Crossroads Companies) who was overwhelmingly rejected at prior community meetings. This meeting on the 27th is apparently to be managed by Planner Spach Trajan. 


From all that Teaneck Voices knows, nothing about these processes is consistent with what are either the promised steps or the statutorily defined MP process. Indeed, the Mayor’s statement that the Master Plan is “almost done” is stranger than strange. The YouTube of Mayor Pagan’s conclusion is below.

Is More Empathy Enough to Heal This Town?

Barbara Ley Toffler, Ph.D.

Organizational Behavior and Social Psychology, Yale University


At the January 9th Council meeting, two FDU professors, Dr. Ben Freer and Dr. Steve Dranoff, from the Center for Empathy presented their Empathy Training Program as a way for Teaneck to ease the increasing hostilities between and among the different religious, racial, and ethnic groups who live as neighbors in this town. In my opinion, the answer to the question: Is more empathy enough to heal this town? Is NO.


When I was in graduate school, one of the biggest debates within the various psychology and sociology disciplines and interdisciplinary programs – most of which addressed Intergroup Relations --was focused on changing people’s minds and building bridges between disparate communities. How to do it? 


One Professor, Leonard Doob an expert in propaganda and conflict resolution, had earlier led his team to conduct interventions in Northern Ireland, Somalia and Ethiopia, and Cyprus. To encapsulate the outcomes:  Huge success during the programs, return to conflict when day-to-day life resumed. Why?


There are two primary reasons:


ONE: You Can Only Change What You Can See: Behavior. The major debate about changing minds – i.e. changing beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions – and ultimately changing the way people acted toward and with each other  -- was the question:


Should you change attitudes to change behavior, or should you change behavior to change attitudes?

 

After 40 years of teaching and working with for-profit, non-profit, and governmental organizations, I have learned that the ONLY way to change how people feel is to change behaviors. BEHAVIOR CHANGES ATTITUDES. 


First of all, none of us will ever really know what another’s ATTITUDE is. All we will know about their attitude is what we attribute to them from their BEHAVIORS we can observe. When we say, “I don’t like your attitude,” what we are really saying is, “I don’t like what you are saying, and I’m assuming I know what your attitude is from what you are saying.” Second of all, most of us simply want the other to stop saying and doing what they are saying and doing since we have no way of really knowing what anyone else’s attitude is.


Empathy Training is aimed at changing attitudes. It guides individuals to understanding intellectually and feeling emotionally what “the other” is thinking and feeling, being in touch with their own thoughts and feelings, and working to help each other understand those internal processes themselves and each other. 


But is that what we need? The members of the different religious, racial, and ethnic groups seem to have a pretty accurate idea of what the others believe, perceive, and feel. And nobody disputes the facts. Different groups interpret them differently.


Everybody knows what horror Hamas wreaked on October 7, 2023; everybody knows what the resolution passed by Council on October 17th says; everybody knows approximately how many Gazan civilians have died. NOBODY AGREES ON WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THOSE DEATHS AND THEREFORE WHAT SHOULD BE DONE, AND NO AMOUNT OF EMPATHY TRAINING WILL EVER BRING MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING OR AGREEMENT.


TWO: Institutional/Subcommunity Values Will Overwhelm Individual Change. There is another critical variable in the mix, learned from the Doob interventions. That is the impact of the institutional/subcommunity values and culture. Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland attended retreats where they were guided to listen to each other, share their views, understand each other, agree that they differed but would respect each other’s attitudes, return to their communities and, within a short time, returned to the basic hostilities that their communities had always felt about each other. While one or two individuals may actually change their “attitudes” longer term, most will not. The explicit and implicit pressures on those who have truly changed will be painful and, likely, untenable to bear for any period of time.


SO WHAT CAN WE DO?


One of the most significant pieces of research conducted on Intergroup Conflict and Intergroup Relations was that done by Muzafer Sherif and Carolyn W. Sherif who published their findings in 1965:


 The findings summarized by Muzafer Sherif and Carolyn W. Sherif, "Research on intergroup relations." Pp.153-177 in Otto Klineberg and Richard Christie (Eds.), Perspectives in Social Psychology. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1965 are as follows:


“1. Contact between the groups involving close proximity in activities enjoyed by members of each group does not necessarily produce a decrease in the existing intergroup hostility. These findings may necessitate some revision of the assumption that mere contacts between groups—without regard to the conditions of contact—through exchange of persons and social get-togethers will by themselves reduce unfavorable intergroup attitudes.


2. Conflict between groups and the products of that conflict were reduced through the introduction of superordinate goals. We define superordinate goals as goals which are compelling for members of two or more groups and cannot be ignored, but which cannot be achieved by the efforts and resources of one group alone. They require the coordinated efforts and resources of all of the groups involved. They are superordinate, rather than merely common goals, in the sense that they must override some of the goals of both groups which are incompatible with them. When groups in conflict come into contact under conditions embodying such goals, they tend to cooperate toward them, as we found in the research.


But conflict and its products were not reduced in one episode. Here too the time dimension has to be brought in as a major variable.


3. Various superordinate goals over a period of time were necessary to sustain cooperation between groups, to permit procedures acceptable to both to be established and then transferred from one situation to the next. In the process, friction between groups and unfavorable stereotypes were reduced. The resulting changes in intergroup behavior were dramatic.


In concluding these generalizations, we venture to state some things that we have learned about the reduction of intergroup conflict. It is true that lines of communication between groups must be opened and contacts established before prevailing conflicts can be reduced. But contact and communication without superordinate goals may serve as occasions for recrimination, for accusations and endless reference to the problem of "Who's to blame?"


When contact and communication involve cooperative efforts toward superordinate goals, they are utilized in the direction of reducing conflict in order to attain the goals. The information about the out-group, which was ignored or rejected when the groups were in conflict, is seen in a new light and the probability of its effectiveness is enormously increased.”


Does Teaneck Have Superordinate Goals That Our Disparate Communities Can Work On Together Over Time?  YES!


THE LONG-DELAYED 2024 MASTER PLAN

In Fall 2023, the development of the new Master Plan (MP), (which should have been written in 2017, 10 years after the previous one),  was kicked off in superb fashion with two community meetings. The meetings included breakout groups that reported on their discussions, and excitement was high at the apparent agreement on goals that was evident.


Reminder: The Master Plan is essentially a contract between the town and its residents about “local development decisions affect your quality of life in many ways, including: a healthy environment, clean and plentiful water, safe roadways, compatible land uses, adequate public facilities, and impacts to property values and taxes. A Master Plan is the blueprint for a municipality that depicts current land uses and guides decisions for both growth and conservation in your community. A Master Plan can provide a cohesive focus by outlining development goals and objectives for a community. It can identify suitable districts for commercial or housing developments; … open space, recreational areas, and environmental resources; historic and cultural resources; and transportation corridors and utilities.” From: Citizen’s Guide to New Jersey Municipal Master Plans


Unfortunately, town planner, Keenan Hughes, who was leading the effort left and that led to a months-long delay in progress. By default, the MP development has been picked up by other planners in Mr. Hughes’ office.


SO – The Teaneck Planning Board – the body responsible for the town’s Master Plan -- should organize a “Let’s Write Our Master Plan Project” (they can appoint a task force to oversee the project) which would involve volunteers or recruitment from the diverse groups in town. Groups composed of representatives of the several sub-communities in Teaneck would each be assigned a land-use area to research and draft that portion of the new MP. 


  • It will bring members of diverse communities into CONTACT with each other.
  • It will provide a common SUPERORDINATE GOAL.
  • It will continue over TIME, because of the nature of the project.


Teaneck’s 2004 “Pathways for the Future” can offer a model for the process of the greater Teaneck Community building its 2024 Master Plan.


No, Empathy Training won’t heal Teaneck. But a Townwide Master Plan Project just might be the true beginning of a resolution of our painful intergroup conflicts.

This Week in Teaneck - March 25-31, 2024

Go to Teaneck Voices’ website for additional access and agenda information that becomes available during the week. Click Here


Stigma Free Advisory Board – Monday, March 25th, 2024, at 6:00 pm by Zoom only Click Here and use passcode 867293.  No agenda information is available.


Hackensack River Greenway Advisory Board – Monday, March 25th, 2024, at 8:00 pm – by Zoom but no other information is currently available.


American Legion Drive Update Public Meeting – Wednesday, March 27th, 2024, at 7:30 in Gym 2 of the Rodda Center and no interaction but by Zoom at Click Here and add passcode 308494.  See the Flyer in the Announcement Section


Shade Tree Advisory Board – Thursday, March 28th, 2024, at 7:00 pm in person in P4 of the Rodda Center 


Teaneck Council Budget Meeting – Thursday, March 28th at 7:00 pm in person in Council Chambers – no Zoom information currently available


  • Discussion of Recreation, Public Works/Engineer, Capital Budget, Manager/Council/Clerk budgets


Planning Board – Thursday, March 28th, 2024, at 8:00 pm in the Library Auditorium. For Zoom and agenda, go to Click Here.


  • The agenda is currently limited to closed-session business only.


Follow-up on Recent Issues

OPRA Amendment Delayed by Legislature


The deluge of organizations (media, environmental, good government) and individuals who, during the week of March 14, strenuously criticized the identical OPRA “reform” bills being proposed by State Senator Sarlo and Assembly member Danielson eventually led those two legislators to withdraw their OPRA bills and to promise the public that the next iteration of their proposals would lead to far better open public record rules.  The critics had argued that the “original “reform” bills would have rendered OPRA effectively inoperative. Our readers should be vigilant – the leaders of this prior reform bill are viewed as both persistent and no friends of OPRA!

Leadership Teaneck Dispute Seemingly Resolved



The universally praised re-introduction of the Leadership Teaneck’s “How this Municipal Government Operates” 10-week training program that will be open to up to 100 participants nearly died last week. Petty Council squabbling had led to two “tied” Council votes which – if not remedied – would have killed the program that was scheduled to begin on April 1st. At the budget meeting on Thursday, the 21st Council came to its senses and unanimously approved the program. All the sessions will be conducted at FDU’s Muscarelle Center Building 7, Room 105. Apparently, there are a few spots still open. See the two narratives on this program in this edition’s Announcement section for information on how to register.

Announcements

Please click the link below to join the webinar:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83170886150

Passcode: 308494

Click on the link below to submit the registration form:

https://forms.gle/y9DVWWcKCDAdfnjo7

Contacting Teaneck Voices


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

IT Editor: Sarah Fisher

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


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