As the December 31 deadline draws nearer for municipalities to have their fair share plans completed in accordance with the state Council on Affordable Housing’s new third-round rules, the West Windsor council and Planning Board have scheduled a joint meeting for Tuesday, October 14.##M:[more]##
The meeting is expected to focus on a discussion of the legal implications associated with the new regulations. The township’s affordable housing committee will also participate in the discussion.
“It’s important for the lawyers to inform all of the elected and appointed officials involved, so they can understand all of the legal implications, so that we don’t have to get into another Toll Brothers case in the future,” said Mayor Shing-Fu Hsueh, who called for the meeting to be organized last month. “Everything we say as elected officials or appointed officials is going to be screened very carefully by the developers,” he added.
His comments echo a fear also held by planning officials, who say West Windsor is now a target for developers looking to easily file builder’s remedy lawsuits against the town. Once the builder shows a town is not compliant with its constitutional obligation in providing fair share, zoning power is taken away from the town and given to the court, and the courts will generally give builders what they want, they say.
West Windsor already has been subject to and lost two such suits — one in 1984, and another in 1993 from Toll Brothers — and because of this, developers will be watching the township closely, officials said. “If we don’t formulate our own plan, I can guarantee that builders will sue West Windsor,” Planning Board Attorney Gerald Muller has said.
Mayor Shing-Fu Hsueh says the township will definitely deliver a plan by December 31, although he and other officials wish they had more time to do a “more thorough job.” Planning officials have also said they would request an extension of the time to submit the plan if they felt they could not meet the December 31 deadline.
The township’s planning officials have already begun looking at ways to provide for West Windsor’s state-mandated share of affordable housing, a subject that has already drawn large public interest and concern over the way in which it can deal with its obligations.
In a series of public meetings last month, the Planning Board contemplated looking at rezoning three sites — two on Princeton-Hightstown Road — that would add 1,”190 new housing units, including 330 affordable, to the township. However, the proposal led to a large turnout by residents, particularly of the Heatherfield residential development, who voiced concern over the possibility of having a dense residential development with a large number of affordable housing on the Scokim site, which is located across from McCaffrey’s, near their homes, and the proposal was cut back.
The three sites included the property of the Princeton Theological Seminary, where the school is rebuilding its graduate student housing; a tract on Princeton-Hightstown Road and Old Trenton Road; and the 24.4-acre Scokim site encompassing Princeton-Hightstown and Southfield roads and McGetrick Lane, where preliminary discussions proposed 232 new affordable housing units and 694 market-rate units. Development of the DeMeglio and Maneely sites, as previously proposed in 2005, would add 98 affordable and 166 market-rate units.
Planning officials later struck down the numbers, saying that the proposals were too ambitious. Planning officials said then that the discussions had only been designed to promote dialogue for helping the board create a plan. The large number of units originally proposed were to provide a cushion, so that in the event that COAH found problems with the plan presented, there would be sufficient alternatives to meet the minimum requirements, with an excess number of 115 units.
Under new third-round COAH regulations, township officials had said they believed, after carrying over some credits from the first and second rounds and accounting for housing projects already in place, that West Windsor still had to satisfy at least 115 more affordable housing credits.
Township officials had said they needed to search for other sites to meet their obligations because they were still uncertain whether the township will be able to carry over rental bonus credits from the second round, and it is uncertain how planning and development of the Maneely site will play out.
In addition, the redevelopment area, which was included in the township’s original third-round fair share plan, is not accounted for in the new plan because of uncertainty over whether redevelopment will actually go through. In the township’s draft third round housing plan, it was assumed that the Wyeth tract and the redevelopment area would have taken care of the township’s entire growth share obligation for the third round.
Officials are saying, however, that the proposals are only preliminary, and work will continue.
Hsueh says township officials began these discussions before the regulations were officially released, because they wanted to get a head start. “Most of the towns in New Jersey probably just started thinking about what to do,” he says. “Nobody has enough time, but we’re trying to make sure we used every possible opportunity to talk and listen to the residents.”
