Leadership needed to establish goals
MARCH 7, 2014
THE RIDGEWOOD NEWS
Leadership needed to establish goals
by Martin Walker
This letter was also sent to the Ridgewood Planning Board.
To the editor:
“Options ‘come down to economics’” (The Ridgewood News, Friday, Feb. 21, page A1) made good headlines, but Planning Board member objections to assisted living and parking facilities around building heights, location and aesthetics in North Walnut Street Redevelopment miss the enormity of issues affecting our community. Are we fiddling while Rome burns, or is there no leadership establishing goals and priorities?
The Organizational Development giant on leadership, Elliott Jacques, demonstrated that levels of institutional authority are correlated with the degrees of future time span awareness. Is no one in town governance articulating a vision for Ridgewood’s future? Doesn’t compromise require a shared goal in order to balance competing needs in the service of a greater good? Visionary leadership for Ridgewood requires a clearer articulation of where we are going.
The two perennial certainties, aging and taxes, provide the most stable variables around which to articulate any family community’s future. Every single one of us will age and the fact that tax revenue is tied to property values means our taxes will increase indefinitely. Visionary leadership must articulate what this means for our town.
Aging: Are we an aging-in community or an aging-out community? Should Ridgewood be required to provide a space for all of our lives, or only parts of it? Should our old age take place here, with easy access to all that we love, or should our elders go live somewhere else?
– See more at: https://www.northjersey.com/opinion/letter-leadership-needed-to-establish-goals-1.736297#sthash.nYJUpHp7.dpuf
Amen – well said. Our leadership needs to start thinking beyond the next election cycle and stop allowing special interests like Valley Hospital and other real estate developers to determine our agenda. We have been in a reactive mode for too long and need an elected official without a personal agenda to map out a vision for the future in a more collaborative way.
Right now we have 3 council members that vote as a block – since they have a majority, they get to decide which of their individual pet projects will get approved first. Do we want these 3 people or ANY 3 people to be able to decide what happens to our town? What they are doing is just wrong. I’m sure that some lawyer out there will say that it’s legal, but that doesn’t make it any less wrong.
The leadership has clear goals.
They are just not the goals of the residents.