Residents sound off on Mountain Lakes development

MOUNTAIN LAKES – More than 100 residents attended a Borough Council meeting Monday to sound off on a developer’s proposal to build 40 townhomes on an isolated 7.7 acre lot behind King of Kings Lutheran Church on Route 46.

The council managed to unanimously pass its annual budget — $8.94 million — without comment from the audience. But a second public-comment period, reserved for discussion of the proposed development, drew a line of residents who continued to speak past 10 p.m.

Several residents previously spoke up at meetings about Hornrock Properties’ proposal to build the townhomes, prompting the council to switch the venue for Monday’s meeting to the high school to accommodate an overflow crowd.

Hornrock, currently building and selling the Legacy of Mountain Lakes luxury townhomes in the borough, is under contract to buy the property owned by the church and is seeking rezoning to build more townhomes on land currently assessed as farmland and zoned for single-family homes on half-acre lots.

One resident read from a petition signed by 233 adult residents expressing their objection to the project, and urging either purchase of the property as open space or maintaining the current zoning.

“This is one of the last two vacant properties of any size in town,” the petition reads. “It is a remarkable wooded tract with steep slopes, a ravine and a stream, abutting 40 acres of borough parkland. It continues a green belt that encircles the town, and buffers other residential neighborhoods from the noise, lights and air pollution from Route 46 and Interstate 80.”

The proposal became a hot-button issue for residents after Hornrock representatives made a public presentation at the Feb. 9 council meeting, where they also presented a sample ordinance for the council to consider that would allow it to build the 40 units. That sample ordinance has yet to be introduced.

Planning consultant Peter Steck added during his Feb. 9 presentation that the development would help address the borough’s affordable-housing obligations. The details of those obligations, however, are unclear in both the borough and other New Jersey towns, according to borough attorney Robert Oostdyk, following a recent New Jersey Supreme court decision that effectively took affordable-housing enforcement out of the hands of the Council on Affordable Housing and into the courts.

Oostdyk also warned that the Supreme Court’s COAH decision opens most New Jersey municipalities to the threat of developers filing a builder’s remedy suit to compel towns to build affordable housing. That concern has been echoed by several municipal attorneys in Morris County in recent weeks.

The residents, however, shook off the threat and spoke unanimously against the proposal. Some cited familiar worries about overburdening schools and water supplies, while others were wary of what they perceived as a developer trying to rush its project past the council and into fruition.

Former councilwoman Ellen Emr, who cosigned a recent letter to the editor of the Daily Record with other former borough officials who object to the development, was among the first to speak.

“Along with the proposed project, there was an ordinance presented and written by the developer’s attorney, changing the zoning to permit that development, and a request that the council pass that ordinance quickly since the developers had been working with council’s economic development committee for the past 13 months,” she said. “(Council) should not change zoning, and seek to justify it later.”

“I think you guys are worried about builder’s remedy suits, and I don’t think you should be,” said another former borough council member, George Jackson. “We really have met our affordable housing requirements. ... It’s not like we have to run scared here.”

Hornrock, however, already has written the borough to indicate its intention of considering a builder’s remedy lawsuit, according to Oostdyk.

“We were not completely surprised that on Friday we received a letter, after the close of business, from the attorneys for Hornrock in which they enclosed for us a copy of the draft complaint they have prepared, showing us what the builder’s remedy complaint would look like as to this property,” Oostdyk said. “So we’re still in the process of evaluating it. It was accompanied by a letter, which I would say was politely but firmly drafted to say their position is they have been working on this project for a long time, and they are not willing to simply sit in the background for months, perhaps several months, while the process unfolds.”

Hornrock Properties, through its attorney, Peter Wolfson, declined to comment.

Council members later discussed a suggestion that they pursue a dual strategy of looking at amending the ordinance while still pursuing open-space grants to fund yet another purchase offer of the land by the borough.

The borough previously obtained funds from the Morris County Open Space Committee to purchase the land from King of Kings, according to interim borough manager Robert Hoffman. King of Kings, however, declined a $1 million offer in 2004, and a $1.6 million offer in 2012 fell $300,000 short of the church’s asking price, according to Hoffman.

Those funds were returned to the county, he said.

Staff Writer William Westhoven: 973-428-6627; wwesthoven@dailyrecord.com.