Reader says The town desperately needs alternative legal advice–YESTERDAY
In My Humble (Honest) Opinion, The town desperately needs alternative legal advice–YESTERDAY.
In particular, the planning board must have an accurate assessment of their range of options in providing a final response to Valley Hospital’s expansion plan.
We simply can’t accept an after-the-fact justification of rubber-stamping Valley’s expansion plan that goes something like this: “We had no choice. If we had said no, Valley would have sued the town and won.” We’ve been down that road before. Thankfully, it led to a last-minute (miraculous?) vindication of the village’s interests by the Village Council in November 2011. (Read the related newspaper article at: https://www.northjersey.com/news/ridgewood-council-opposes-valley-hospital-renewal-plan-1.243368 )
“We had no choice, we had to say yes” is a lame excuse. Fortunately, as a legal theory, it also doesn’t actually hold water.
I sometimes wonder about attorneys who advise municipal governing bodies (Rogers) and planning boards (Price). On the one hand, none of the individual councilmembers, board members, or the mayor can lay claim to having that attorney as their personal lawyer, because strictly speaking, the latter’s client is the municipality. This means no elected or appointed official can legitimately bend the town attorney’s efforts toward their own personal gain or aggrandizement. This is a good thing, of course!
On the other hand, though, non-citizen third party entities like Valley seem to be quite willing and able to spend enormous sums to employ brash mouthpieces to twist municipal law, articulate one-sided theories of liability, and put whatever village attorney is in front of them into some kind of a deer-in-the-headlights trance. The goal, of course, is to get him or her to lose focus his client’s best interests and unwittingly begin promoting those of the third party. Ms. Price’s unnecessarily accommodative behavior in response to the condescending approach of Valley’s lawyer in abruptly and rudely interrupting concerned village residents trying to speak at many recent public planning board meetings this past winter is evidence to show that Valley Hospital’s strategy of relentless pressure and shameless and unapologetic advocacy can eventually bear fruit, particularly when the targeted municipality regularly fails to stick up for itself.
New Jersey municipalities are not just in the business of avoiding lawsuits! They should be about exercising firm but appropriate control on development in the interests of residents and the municipal entity, riding herd on their hired attorneys to ensure they are accurately apprised of the full range of acceptable action in response to third party petitions/applications, and actively discouraging the latter from developing and acting upon one-sided legal theories that bully elected and appointed officials by magnifying out of all proportion the true risk of litigation. Town attorneys who fail to paint a full and appropriately nuanced legal picture for their client risk looking like patsies when sophisticated, deep-pocket entities like Valley Hospital are inexplicably allowed to win major battles, and even entire wars over the course of months or years of wrangling over proposed changes to Ridgewood’s master plan and municipal law without having to fire a single ‘litigation’ shot.
This is a very thoughtful and well stated piece. I could not agree more. While I appreciate the need for formal processes and the need to avoid litigation, we have clearly moved too far in the other direction. The planning board has become an impotent farce.
The result are meetings that are like bad theater instead of informed dialogue. Sort of like Congress has become since CSPAN started broadcasting hearings. We need to get back to a model where dialogue can occur and compromise can be reached. When everything is an up or down vote, nothing productive is achieved.
Let ’em sue! Just say NOOOOOOOOOO.