Call it a tale of two townships.

August 17, 2005
Driven by Development
By GLENN COLLINS
NORTH HALEDON, N.J., Aug. 15 - Call it a tale of two townships.
Across the state border, they are 30 minutes, and 20 highway miles, apart. The borough of North Haledon in Passaic County, N.J., is verging on maximum buildout. Seventy percent of the town of Tuxedo in Orange County, N.Y., is open land.
But the towns are linked by more than the rainwater from Tuxedo that becomes the pure drinking water flowing from North Haledon's 1,431 wells.
The destinies of both municipalities are being driven by the urgency of escalating development. That point was made very publicly last month when Randy George, North Haledon's mayor, rose to take the microphone at a crowded Tuxedo public hearing on a new subdivision. He was the only New Jersey official who had made the trip.
Not unlike Marley's Ghost, he summoned up a dire specter: his premonition of Tuxedo's future.
Developers lie, Mr. George said from all-too-personal experience. They offer charming architects' renderings that might bear little resemblance to the projects they build. They talk about revenue riches but leave towns with schools to build, sewers to pay for and taxes to raise.
"The developers promise you everything, but you must remember, they are there to make money," he cautioned the audience in Tuxedo's 1928 town hall. "And as soon as they are gone, you're left holding the bag." The residents of 3.4-square-mile North Haledon and 45.6-square-mile Tuxedo are at the fulcrum of longstanding demographic and developmental forces that have increasingly claimed the attention of local governments and agitated residents across the region.
New Jersey, the nation's most densely populated state, is expected to grow by more than 750,000 people in the next decade or so. Planners predict that the demand from young home buyers, and baby boom grandparents retiring to designer communities in record numbers, will quickly consume all developable land.
"Development has been happening for hundreds of years, but it's more intense than ever because there is so little land left," Mr. George said.
And in a surprising admission for a politician, the mayor said that he - and the six-person Borough Council that he works with closely - had, in part, failed. "We've done well in limiting development, but we couldn't stop it," Mr. George said. Of the new residents, he said, "Though they pay taxes, they cost us money for services." He ticked off a few of the borough's developmental headaches:
Its insurers required North Haledon to buy a $750,000 new ladder truck for its volunteer fire department, to reach the tall new town houses being built in an abandoned quarry by K. Hovnanian Homes. Then the borough had to contribute $100,000 for an addition to the firehouse on High Mountain Avenue to shelter the new truck.
On Sept. 27, voters will consider a $30 million referendum to replace a 100-year-old elementary school.
The police force has grown from 17 to 18, and the public works department has hired new officials.
North Haledon is planning a $950,000 addition to its public works garage. It already had to buy a new $300,000 Jet-Vac machine to scour its sewer lines. To pay for such amenities, the borough had to impose a sewer-connection fee of $7,400 per unit on developers "because the state won't support towns by enacting developer-impact fees," the mayor said.
Burly and bearded, the 52-year-old Mr. George - who is on occasion taken for the actor John Malkovich - has held office since 1999. He and his wife, Lynn, have raised four daughters during the two decades they have lived in North Haledon. A lifelong Republican, he insists that despite his battles with builders, "I am not a tree-hugger."
Like 14 of the 16 mayors in Passaic County, he is a part-timer. Salary: $5,000 a year. He regularly spends 35 hours a week on mayoral duties, and his political avocation has often competed with his painting contracting business.
Developers have the upper hand because "they have more lobbying power than the towns, and more experience than many of the mayors and council people," the mayor contended. "They know more than I'll ever know about getting what they want."
Or as the North Haledon council president, Bruce O. Iacobelli - like the mayor, a Republican - said in an interview: "You have to watch everything the developers do, because they try to get in and get out as quickly as they can."
The borough's vigilance is such that on Aug. 3, it declared one developer, Belmont Homes, in default of its agreement to complete a six-unit complex on Sturr Street after an inspector found construction deficiencies. The developer has promised to address the problems.
The adversarial relationship seems never-ending, Mr. George said. Hovnanian tried to pack more than 700 town houses on its 101-acre quarry property but North Haledon wrestled the builder down to the current total, 301, he said.
"There are always negotiations that go on between a town and a developer," said Doug Fenichel, a spokesman for Hovnanian. He rejected any suggestion that Hovnanian has a build-it-and-run approach: "You don't survive in business since 1959, as we have, if you aren't taking care of municipalities."
Well-manicured, working-class and proud of it, this borough some two miles from Paterson had a 2002 population of 8,033, according to a census estimate, but will soon reach 9,000, Mayor George said.
In Tuxedo, there is still farmland and open space, but, according to Mike Edelstein, a psychology professor at Ramapo College who is the Democratic candidate for Orange County executive in the Nov. 8 election, "we are moving toward buildout like lightning."
Although formerly agrarian New Jersey towns saw a prodigious amount of development after World War II, the current growth in Orange County is "happening at a pace that is much faster," Dr. Edelstein said. "Without effective planning, we are heading toward a high tax base, a relative lack of services, impossibly congested roads and school-tax revolts."
In Tuxedo, Mayor George spoke in opposition to a plan to build Sterling Forge, 107 minimansions on a 575-acre tract of privately owned land within the 20,400-acre Sterling Forest, a preserve that New York, New Jersey and private donors spent $78.2 million to make forever wild. The turnout was so large that the hearing will be resumed Monday night, and Mayor George will be there. Mary Yrizarry, a longtime Tuxedo resident, is looking forward to the mayor's return, since his original speech "gave comfort to a lot of people who are afraid that town governments are not paying attention to these issues," she said.
"The idea that one town government would tell another town government how it really was - that's quite unusual."
But to Louis Heimbach, the president of Sterling Forest L.L.C., the Tuxedo developer, opponents of Sterling Forge "don't want anything to happen here."
"The world we live in has been built by development," he said. "Our world didn't get here thanks to the tooth fairy. Without developers we'd all be living in caves."
Developers insist that towns have all the advantages, by determining zoning in their state-mandated master plans, and in requiring new developments to satisfy inspections, performance bonds and "150 different permits with five different layers of government involved," said Patrick O'Keefe, chief executive of the New Jersey Builders Association in Robbinsville.
Mayor George responded, "I want them regulated by as many people as often as possible."
But Mr. Fenichel of Hovnanian worries that antigrowth bias will drive New Jersey residents - and jobs - away.
The state should be building 50,000 homes a year to keep abreast of its growing population, he said, but "only 25,000 to 35,000 new homes a year are being built."
Mr. O'Keefe said: "Nimby says go elsewhere. But when young people need a new place to live, or aging parents need a place to downsize, or if the marriage breaks up and the partners are looking for a place to go, they find that elsewhere is not a place on the map."