In what has clearly become a pattern of “going it alone,” the TC turned down the offer to “opt in,” even though merely sending a nonbinding “letter of intent” would have given the town an additional year to come up with a viable COAH plan. It did however apply for a $15,000 grant to study the implications of joining.

This led to the following bizarre exchange, as reported in the newspaper:

Committeeman John Malay suggested sending a letter of intent as a way to buy the township time. Committeewoman Mary Pavlini agreed.

But Committeeman Scott Spitzer said he did not wish to send a letter if the committee had no intention of opting in.

“We shouldn’t act on a loophole but on what we think is right, instead of going along with this ruse,” Spitzer said.

Committeewoman Carolyn Kelly agreed. “I just don’t trust everybody,” she said. “Every time we discuss this, we hear different things. I don’t think anything that comes out from COAH or Highlands has any credibility.”

After Carpenter joined Spitzer and Kelly against sending a letter of intent, the committee briefly discussed the fate of the $15,000 grant from the state, which the township has yet to receive.

Carpenter said he wasn’t necessarily in favor of giving the money back. Spitzer joked that it could help fund the litigation against COAH.

This seems to me to make it pretty clear that none of the Committee members are really looking at this with an open mind, from the standpoint of long term benefit to Bernards Township, or even in some cases with any degree of integrity. Since the Committee has seemingly already made up its mind – based on some questionable arguments by Township Engineer Pete Messina – it seems disingenuous to continue to go after the grant.

So Malay and Pavlini were not above sending a clearly misleading letter in order to buy time to avoid dealing with COAH, and Carpenter is not above keeping the money even though he has no intention of honoring the intent of the grant. It may even be, given Spitzer’s wry comment, that one or two of the members are starting to wonder whether suing to avoid the town’s COAH obligations is really worth it.

If the COAH formula is truly flawed, as the town’s lawsuit alleges, then why not go back to the Council with a recommendation for a better one? The idea of trying to settle intergovernmental affairs – especially a dispute over rules designed to bring about a minimum of equity and housing assistance to the needy in each area – through the courts seems, on the face of it, a poor one, and likely to produce the worst possible outcome.

In an adversarial relationship, each side hardens its position and seeks to defeat the other by any possible. Only one side can win. The winning side then risks hubris, while the losing camp loses self-respect and translates this into an enduring resentment, which is readily returned. The TC feels COAH is trying to foist more low-end development on the town; the Council feels that wealthy towns like Bernards are simply irresponsible. And both are at least partly right.

But to reject both the town’s responsibility for more affordable housing (or try to find “technical” ways around it) and the opportunity to join in an environmentally-responsible regional master plan, is indicative of the knee-jerk, head-in-the-sand attitude of our local politicos. Because there is one-party rule, the level of debate never rises much above snide comments and backroom deals. Whether these help or harm the community may not be apparent for a while, but the lack of transparency and of accountability will always produce negative outcomes in the long term.

Jonathan Cloud, November 22, 2008

Postscript: We received a number of comments on this via email, which we’re posting into a single entry following this post. Julia Somers, Executive Director of the NJ Highlands Coalition, has agreed to speak at our meeting on December 17 (6:30 p.m. at the Public Library, 32 South Maple Ave., Basking Ridge) – all are welcome.

What seems clear is that the Township Committee has thus far reacted irrationally, based on faulty information, and we would like to see them reconsider their position.

Should the administration move first on health care, or on the environment, or on housing, or on the economy? Clearly the answer is that it has to do all of these. The question most often asked in the media, though, is how to pay for it.

In some ways this is a strange question, because it is the government that issues the means to pay for things in the first place. But we maintain the polite fiction that it is run like a household, and really ought to balance its budget (except when it shouldn’t). Underneath this is the fear that government will continue to issue money until it causes inflation, and we’ll all be pushing around wheelbarrows of worthless dollars.

Of course this is nonsense.

If the money that the government prints it uses to invest in infrastructure, in science, in health care, and in addressing the challenges of climate change, it strengthens rather than weakens society and the economy. Spending more money means creating new jobs, putting America back to work (and most importantly back to productive work that does not harm but rather restores the global ecosystem), unleashing creativity, and engaging passion. In this context, balancing the federal budget becomes again an interesting challenge, a long-term goal, based on growing the economy. This economic growth must however be based on the principles of sustainability; we need to make a shift from an extractive economy to a renewable, self-sustaining one. The issue is not whether or not to spend money; the issue is where to spend it, to get the most sustainable growth per dollar invested. And we need to think in terms of the long-term return on investment as well, to see this investment as being on behalf of all future generations as well as our own.

This also implies, to some degree, a new approach to economics. It is more than life-cycle costing, valuing environmental services, and incorporating such externalities as greenhouse gas emissions, though it includes all of these. It must be rethought based on the presupposition that the the goal of the economy is to accelerate fairly-distributed abundance, and not simply to increase the already highly concentrated wealth that exists today. And even the wealthy will gladly pay for a return to economic growth and prosperity.

The role of government, then, is help organize people productively and profitably to produce that which is in the society’s long-term best interest. By assisting and supporting the development of sustainable communities, businesses, and families, government fulfills a role that can be embraced by liberals and conservatives alike, that puts the economy at the service of its citizens and inspires them to create more wealth, by creating more value, more innovation, and more self-sufficiency.

(First posted at http://jonathancloud.com/?p=56, November 13, 2008.)