Two Tales of a City

This morning there is a nice follow-up story in the Times by Meir Rinde, about the planned staged re-development of the Roebling Wire complex by homegrown developers HHG Development Associates. The article, which features a nice photo of a grinning Mercer County Executive Brian Hughes, talks about the plan for this long-vacant and disused site, which has lain in limbo ever since the aborted Manex Entertainment plan a decade ago. An accompanying editorial in the paper today also celebrates these plans. Of course, an announcement does not a development make, but man! does it feel good to read a story like this!

The takeaway quote in the article today belongs to Mr. Hughes: “Development in the city isn’t easy, especially in these times. I congratulate them [HHG] for looking beyond today and thinking about tomorrow.”

Hmmm.. “especially in these times.” Do you wonder what he’s referring to? Surely, the tough economic times that Mercer County, all of NJ, and the rest of the US still endure.  The overall climate continues to make it real hard for developers like HHG to get a project like the Roebling Works under way, and hard to attract businesses and individuals to buy and rent in projects such as these.

I wish the best of luck to HHG, and thank Mr. Hughes and his staff, and the Mercer County Improvement Authority for helping to midwife this. I’m sure we all look forward to tracking the process of this development.

But, do you think perhaps Mr. Hughes was referring, oh so subtly, to the ongoing mishigas of our own making in the Capital City?

Also in the Times today is an excellent article by Alex Zdan that continues to develop the ongoing story of the Walnut Avenue development proposal that would have sold 36 city-owned properties to one of the companies owned by Pennsylvania’s Robert Jordan, also identified and confirmed as a large donor of an illegal contribution to Mayor  Mack’s campaign last year.

Today’s Times article continues LA Parker’s  reporting in yesterday’s Trentonian. Both articles rely heavily on the work and research done on this matter by Jim Carlucci, who’s really done an outstanding job of uncovering the dots, and connecting them.  The Trentonian’s coverage, yesterday and for the preceding few days, focused on the nature of the relationship between the various entities and individuals associated with them who both made the campaign contributions and who sought to do business with the City. This reporting led to an admission by Mayor Mack – at least as stated second-hand by former Councilman Bill Young on the Mayor’s behalf – that the contributions from Jordan and/or his company were improper and illegal, and that at least a portion of the donations would be returned in an effort to forestall any action over the violation by the state’s Election Law Enforcement Commission (ELEC). Whether it’s too late for that without a fine or worse remains to be seen.

Anyway, today’s coverage focuses in on the nature of the Ordinance that Council has on their agenda this Tuesday regarding the Jordan deal, now apparently dead. This Ordinance, first presented to Council last month but tabled, turns out to be seriously, seriously flawed and defective.

The Ordinance states that the 36 properties to have been sold to Jordan’s SR Development were all in the East State Street Development Area, and covered by the objectives and other terms of the plan. Being in a redevelopment zone would allow the city the power to sell property without letting it out for private bid.

Well, it turns out that of the 36 properties to be sold, only 3 (I counted none, but that may be my mistake) of them are actually in the East State Street zone (the full plan, with a map, is here). Actually, the Redevelopment zone in which some – and only some – of these properties lie, is the Central East Redevelopment area  (the plan and map, here), not mentioned in the Ordinance. And the boundaries of this zone do not include the 300 nor 400 block of Walnut Avenue, where most of the properties to be sold, are located.

Of the 36 properties to have been sold by this ordinance, fully two-thirds of them are located in NO redevelopment zone, and therefore can not by law, be sold other than by public bidding. The proposed sale was for a total of $36.00. Today’s article by Zdan reports the assessed value of the parcels at a total of $979,500., about $27,000 and change per lot.

You do the math.

After looking at the maps of the two zones, I read the narratives for both plans a little more closely. According to the Plan  for Central East, “The primary objective of the Redevelopment Plan is to facilitate the rehabilitation of City-owned properties and privately-owned vacant buildings and land for residential use” within a Residential “B” designation for the neighborhood.

Nowhere in the plan is it mentioned that the neighborhood is targeted for low-income or affordable housing. That, however, is the basis of the proposal that the Administration asked Council to approve: SR Development submitted projections for their units  premised on sale prices of $99,000 for 3 bedroom houses, and for Section 8 Rentals. This doesn’t sound at all like Market rate housing in a Residential “B” Zone.

However! The Plan for the East State Street Zone – in which, remember, either 3 or none of these properties lie – does state that “The Plan recognizes the value of the existing housing in the Area as an affordable housing resource for households currently living in the area, and seeks improvements to that housing stock to benefit the households of similar social and economic condition.”

I find it very curious that the Zone referenced by the City in its proposed Ordinance uses language friendly to that proposal, even though none or a handful of the properties to be sold lie within that Zone. I won’t say that the City deliberately misstated the Redevelopment Zone to make the Ordinance read friendlier to this type of development, but it is one Whopper of a mistake.

Today, it sounds that SR Development is eager to walk away from this plan, as fast as they can. We can’t let this ill-considered proposal go away. The campaign-related and pay-to-play issues will no doubt be investigated by ELEC –  and others.

Trenton’s City Council needs to investigate how a fatally-defective Ordinance came so close to passage: how it came to reference the WRONG Redevelopment plan, and how it included a list of 36 properties of which CLOSE TO TWO DOZEN WERE NOT EVEN LOCATED IN ANY REDEVELOPMENT ZONE.

The Acting Directors and any involved staff of both the Law and Housing & Economic Development Departments, as well as the Mayor,  need to be called to Council to explain this, to be held accountable, and to ensure that Council is not misled – deliberately or inadvertently – like this again.