BREAKING NEWS:
NEW JERSEY MEADOWLANDS COMMISSION VOIDS AGREEMENT WITH ENCAP!
NJMC kicks out controversial developer, state action could
end litigation with North Arlington, Massa, local officials hail
decision as long overdue!
NORTH
ARLINGTON - The New Jersey Meadowlands Commission terminated the agreement with EnCap Holdings as the developer of record after
years of delays, cost overruns and financial questions that have plagued the
project since it's inception.
The
decision by the regional planning commission to move in another direction comes
after months of brutal press reports that exposed a variety of environmental,
legal and financial misgivings that led to the Trump Organization coming aboard
to save the embattled project that is
currently in litigation with North Arlington and headed for litigation with
Rutherford.
"As
mayor, I'm relieved that the NJMC has finally made the right decision. The
question of remediation has always been supported by all involved. But when this project became nothing more than
an out-of-control housing project, the wheels kind of fell off," noted
Mayor Pete Massa, long a proponent of a federal inquiry into the EnCap project as far back as April of 2006.
This
decision to "fire" EnCap ends a long political saga that resulted in
the defeat of every local mayor in North Arlington, Lyndhurst and Rutherford
who supported this ill fated plan to construct thousands of units of housing
along with the construction of low income units.
Lyndhurst
Mayor James Guida along with North Arlington Mayors Len Kaiser, Russ Pitman and
Rutherford Mayor Bernadette McPherson all met defeat at the polls due to their
unbridled support for this controversial and unpopular redevelopment scheme.
What was
marketed as a miracle for the Meadowlands
turned into a nightmare for state officials and those who supported the
plan to transform three small communities into mini-cities that lacked any
local support. More importantly, the clean-up process met all kinds of hurdles
while EnCap fell into the rears seeking tax appeals in all the communities in
question.
"The
whole sordid affair has seemed to come to closure. There is a lesson here and
the lesson is that public policy can't be formulated in a vacuum to benefit a
developer. The homeowners effected by this project is in the thousands and at
the end of the day, all this project did was raise property taxes. The best course of action now is to clean-up the
parcels in question and simply start over," said Council President
Steve Tanelli, long an opponent of EnCap's phase three project Arlington Valley.
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Today will have more
information on this decision by the NJMC later this week or as new information
becomes available.
