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 Posted: Thu, Jul 28 2011, 1:02 pm EDT Post subject: Re: Why our right wing governor is so bad for the environment |
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| Guest wrote: | | Guest wrote: | | Guest wrote: | | The New Jersey Supreme Court has always been the pride of new Jersey - with justices' appointments spanning many many governors with differing ideologies. These fine people have served New Jersey and its constituents well. They are mostly underappreciated and underpaid |
This is the same supreme court which brought New Jersey the worse affordable housing rules in the country, rules which are really just a front for big developer interests? The same court that brought us the Abbott school funding laws that have been a disaster, and are just a front for special interests as well? You keep dreaming the dream. |
I think you need to separate the court decision, especially the original court decision from the way the New Jersey legislature and successive governors chose to implement the decision.
The original decision was most definitely not a front for big developers. The implementation most definitely was. While I am sure there were some competent hard working people at COAH, all of my interactions with them were with fire breathing zealots or near complete incompetents, not a good combination. |
The court has made many subsequent activist decisions that reinforced the developer interest in the affordable housing laws, so their hands are hardly clean. Consider the massive “Princeton Junction” development that was finally finishes just a few years ago. West Windsor fought the developer for 16 years before the state supreme court forced them to let the development proceed. It was a typical builder’s remedy project, developing a quota of lower income apartments with a much higher ratio of larger at-market McMansions (“the Estates at Princeton Junction,” “the Meadows at Princeton Junction” etc.) on postage stamp size lots, resulting in over 1,000 new households that the Township didn’t want and years of taxpayer pain to their public works, services and schools. They are still dealing with the fall-out as they have to massively re-work storm drainage, re-do roads and traffic patterns, and adjust to swelling school enrollment. Granted, West Windsor should have given up the fight years before given the favorable climate to developers in New Jersey and tried to negotiate more consessions from the developer to cover all the subsequent public works projects that resulted. But the underlying fact is the state supreme court is notoriously favorable to developers. New Jersey has a national reputation for being “developer friendly” which is a euphemism for being in developer’s (and the trade unions that benefit from developer projects) pockets. |
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