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Highlands Plan Closer to Public Study Members Disagree Over Compensation, Whether the Revised Plan is Complete
CHESTER TWP. --
The New Jersey Highlands Council voted 10-4 late Monday to release a
revised draft regional Master Plan to the public but won't do so until
some mostly technical word changes requested by council members are made. Some 120 people,
who stood ringing the walls and crowding into the doorway of a small
meeting room for six hours, were kept in the dark after the meeting, as
they had been during the meeting, as they tried to follow along with the
council's technical deliberations. "For all
these people to be sitting here for all these hours and have nothing in
their hands to even know what you're talking about, it's just
idiotic," said Hank Klumpp, a Tewksbury farmer who has attended most
of the council's meetings. Once the plan is
available to the public, there will be a 90-day public comment period with
three public hearings. Council
Executive Director Eileen Swan said the current version has about a dozen
differences from the previous plan. Among those are more zones on the map,
a process by which municipalities can make changes to the map and the
mapping of nearly 150,000 acres considered appropriate to receive high
density growth transferred from what's designated the preservation area. In its
resolution on the plan, the council included its strongest statement to
date about seeking funds to compensate landowners who have been unable to
develop their properties since the 2004 Highlands Water Protection and
Planning Act was signed. The council
rejected an effort by member Kurt Alstede and Sussex County Freeholder
Glenn Vetrano to pass language that would have precluded the council from
adopting a plan unless the governor and Legislature provided adequate
funding for landowners who lost the right to develop their properties.
Alstede said he would not vote to release the plan without such language. The Highlands
act established the 860,000-acre region that includes most of northern
Hunterdon County and northwestern Somerset County and broke it roughly in
half into a preservation area, with strict controls on development, and a
planning area, where development may continue. Preservation-area
towns will have to follow the regional Master Plan's rules; planning area
communities do not but may choose to conform. An analysis done
for the lawsuit that Warren County and several property owners filed
against the law put the loss of preservation area landowners' property
values at $15 billion. The council's
rejected resolution would ask "the executive and legislative branches
to take the necessary steps to effectuate the landowner fairness
provisions of the Highlands act to provide a strong and significant
commitment by the state to fund the acquisition of exceptional natural
resource value lands." Alstede
suggested that the plan may not be complete. Particularly, he said, it
does not include a calculation of the cost of implementing the act, nor of
the amount of additional development the region can accommodate, as the
act requires. "This is
light years ahead, but I still think we are short the mandatory provisions
the law says we need," he said. Swan said that
the staff believes the plan does meet the requirements of the law. Once the council
makes the plan public, it should be available at the council's Web site, www.highlands.state.nj.us.
·
Colleen O'Dea can be reached at (973)
428-6655 or codea@gannett.com. |
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