An affluent Essex County township is gearing up for another court hearing in its contentious fight over the site of a required affordable housing development.
A Superior Court judge is scheduled to hear arguments on Oct. 31 on whether Millburn should be forced to move its public works building to a new location at 22 East Willow St. to make way for affordable housing.
The public works facility is tangled up in a larger affordable housing dispute. Its current location in downtown Millburn — at 9 Main St. — is where township officials previously agreed to place a 75-unit affordable housing development.
“Nobody’s talking about not building 75 units,” said Alex McDonald, the township’s business administrator. “We’re only talking about doing this in a different way.”
After years of litigation and negotiations with an unrelated developer over affordable housing, township officials reached a settlement agreement with the nonprofit Fair Share Housing Center and RPM, the developer for the Main Street site, in 2021.
A state judge then reviewed and approved the settlement, which outlined how Millburn would fulfill its state-mandated obligation to offer affordable housing, said Josh Bauers, an attorney with the Fair Share Housing Center.
The plan included building a development consisting entirely of 75 affordable units at the Main Street site, among other affordable housing projects.
After years of delays, Millburn officials said earlier this year they would no longer honor the original agreement. That led to a frustrated judge ordering the township in July to move forward with the plan, Gothamist reported.
Township officials appealed the decision and said it had not found a new site for its public works building, despite previously purchasing the East Willow site. In a court filing, RPM produced documents showing officials previously planned to move the building to the site, Gothamist reported.
An appeals court then ruled against the township.
The Oct. 31 hearing comes after RPM asked the judge to issue a restraining order barring the town from using the site for anything other than relocating the public works facility, Gothamist reported.
“I think we are hopeful that Millburn will stop fighting, that they’re going to stop fighting and actually allow this development to move forward,” Bauers said of the Main Street site. “It is a great location for affordable housing.”
McDonald, the township’s business administrator, said Millburn proposed two alternative sites to build the affordable housing units slated for the Main Street site. Officials want the development moved due to concerns about the public works building’s location and contamination on the site.
“As we went through more due diligence on the property, more constraints were discovered about the property,” he said, acknowledging officials previously agreed to build there.
The township purchased the East Willow site for $2.2 million and received a $200,000 grant from the state to help purchase it, McDonald said.
But, he denied RPM’s assertion the property was purchased solely for the public works facility.
“It wasn’t necessarily just for one particular purpose,” he said. “We need a new community center, a new senior center. We also are doing a town hall renovation project that we need a temporary location for our town hall employees.”
McDonald said Millburn is often incorrectly characterized as a township that doesn’t want to build affordable housing.
“I understand that at some times it’s being construed that we don’t want to build affordable housing, but that’s quite the contrary,” he said, “in the fact that we’ve built and complied with everything in our settlement agreement.”
“All we’re doing is asking for some flexibility for this last portion of the agreement,” he said.
The Oct. 31 hearing is related to the state’s third round of housing obligations for New Jersey municipalities, which were first issued more than 20 years ago.
Millburn is already fighting its next round obligations, which were released last week.
The township was one of the nine original plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed against the state last month, which says a recently-enacted law designed to create more affordable housing is an “overreach” by state officials.
The lawsuit has since been amended and there are now 21 municipal plaintiffs suing the state over the affordable housing law.
Stories by Brianna Kudisch
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Brianna Kudisch may be reached at bkudisch@njadvancemedia.com.