Back to Court
Posted by Adam Gordon on December 20th 2010
Today, the State Senate is expected to vote on S-1/A-3447, which we previously analyzed here. However, Gov. Christie has suggested he will veto the bill. If the Legislature and the Governor end up in a stalemate, even though they seem to be in agreement on getting rid of COAH and the commercial development fee, where would that leave housing policy in New Jersey?
It would mean that the Fair Housing Act of 1985, and COAH, remain law. And, based on Judge Skillman’s October decision invalidating COAH’s Third Round rules, COAH is under a March 8 deadline to adopt new rules that comply with the court’s requirement to go back to the Second Round methodology for calculating municipal fair share. The Court emphasized that, due to the decade-plus passage of time since the start of the Third Round, time was of the essence in coming up with new rules.
The deadline for COAH to propose regulations complying with the court’s decision has come and gone. COAH would have had to propose regulations for public comment by December 2, which did not happen. FSHC asked at COAH’s December 8 meeting (the first since the decision, after COAH canceled its October and November meetings) for a progress update on the remand, and COAH’s chair, DCA Commissioner Lori Grifa, could not identify anything that had been accomplished on the remand.
In response to the Christie Administration’s failure to comply with the court’s remand order, we filed a motion late Friday afternoon asking the court to appoint a special master to conduct the remand process and come up with new fair share numbers. While the court has rejected similar relief and deferred to COAH’s process in the past, it is clear at this point that COAH has no intention of complying with the court’s decision and is not following the very specific instructions given by the court.
Given the potential for political stalemate in Trenton, the Asbury Park Press, Courier News, Courier Post, and Home News Tribune all ran an editorial yesterday that suggested courts take a stronger role in making towns “discriminating against low income housing… vulnerable to litigation from housing developers.” These newspapers recognized that “the principle of developing housing for a variety of income levels across New Jersey remains valid” regardless of the outcome of the political debate.
The newspapers’ editorials echo the Supreme Court’s own words. In its Hills decision upholding the Fair Housing Act in 1986, the Supreme Court said that if COAH “achieves nothing but delay, the judiciary will be forced to resume its appropriate role.”
After a decade of nothing but delay, the time for the judiciary to resume that role, and appoint a special master to oversee a fair process, has arrived.
