Ridgewood NJ, the Ridgewood asked for some feed back from the candidates on the March 9th “informational ” meeting with the Village Council on the high density housing projects for the central business district .
Council Candidate Jeff Voigt said , “I am concerned there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty around the school children projections. The analysis done by BFJ planning makes the assumption that the mix of units in the new buildings will be the same as existing apartment inventory and then uses this assumption on what the number of students will be moving forward. Since the builders can build whatever they want, this assumption should not be made. As I had suggested at the meeting a sensitivity analysis should be done on the best and worst cases. it is a relatively straight forward process and would provide us with the risk and costs of various scenarios and the likelihoods of these happening. ”
Jeff went on to say that , the real estate agent (who stood up) expressing his concern about 55 students coming out of 70+ apartments. This type of relationship also holds in the Ridge Apt’s where 37 children come out of 40 (2 bedroom) apartments. Since Ridgewood is a magnet town for education I can see many families moving into these apt just for the education – even in the one bedrooms. If either of these scenarios plays out with the new developments – we could have 100+ children in our school system. Not good.
He also added that , “The planning board needs to scrutinize the site plans for each of these developments very carefully considering each site plan should have a plan for how daily life/traffic is going to function while they put up their rather large edifices. Stipulations made by the planning in their approval is going to be extremely important.”
Jeff also echoed the sentiment of many residents when he said the meeting ,”Overall, very disappointing”
