(October 2004)
For the past three years, the Fund for a Better Waterfront (FBW), a local advocacy group, has locked horns with Stevens Institute of Technology over its waterfront development proposals and excavation of asbestos-containing rock on the campus. The conflict continued last week as FBW appealed the Hoboken Zoning Board’s approval of a massive 725-car parking garage for Stevens facing the waterfront. Attorney Michael Garofalo of Laddey Clark & Ryan filed the appeal in New Jersey Superior Court on behalf of FBW. According to Garofalo, the Court should reverse the Zoning Board approval on two grounds: the Board exceeded its authority by granting 18 variances from the Hoboken Zoning Code and an impermissible conflict arose when Stevens Institute hired as a consultant the brother of the Zoning Board Chair.
Above photograph of site shows plans for garage superimposed on image. Babbio Center, still under construction, is above right, McLean Hall on left, viewed from Sinatra Park looking west.
The Hoboken Zoning Board approved this four-story garage application on August 17, 2004 after 8 months of protracted hearings. The proposed building extends nearly a full city block, 386 feet from Fifth Street to Sixth along Sinatra Drive, directly across the street from Sinatra Park along Hoboken’s waterfront. More than a year prior to obtaining these approvals, Stevens partially constructed the portion of the garage that is situated directly underneath the Babbio Center, also known as the Center for Technology Management.
FBW’s legal challenge claims that only the Hoboken City Council, not the Zoning Board, has the authority to amend the code, and it cannot be done by variance. In other words, the Board’s granting of some 18 variances represented a de facto rezoning of the property that is not permitted by New Jersey law. Hoboken’s zoning provides a special district, R-1(E), just for Stevens Institute. For this zoning district, the code requires 50% of the land be open space; the garage project has 6% open space. Buildings can be only 200 feet long; this structure extends 386 feet along Sinatra Drive and 297 feet along Sixth Street. One principal building is allowed per lot; this lot already has McLean Hall and the Babbio Center. A public parking garage must also be set back from residential districts by at least 100 feet; this garage is just 31 feet from the R-1 residential zoning district.
FBW attorney Michael Garofalo has stated that the conflict issue has fatally tainted the hearings and will force the Court to reverse the Zoning Board approval. In a January 30th news story, George Crimmins told the Jersey Journal that his year-long consulting job with Stevens Institute included work on the university’s 725-car waterfront parking garage. George Crimmins, the former Business Administrator for the City of Hoboken, is the brother of Zoning Board Chair Joe Crimmins.
Joe Crimmins presided over the first three hearings on this garage application. After FBW’s attoney wrote to the Board in May of 2004 about the conflict, Joe Crimmins recused himself from the case. Garofalo argued that the Board must begin the hearings anew, but Board attorney, Doug Bern ruled that the hearings could continue. George Crimmins frequently attended the Zoning Board hearings and spoke in favor of the application. His brother Joe also attended many of the hearings after recusing himself, and stood up and applauded when the Board voted to approve the project.
According to Garofalo, the Appellate Court decision of Care of Tenafly v. the Zoning Board of Adjustment, 307 N.J. Super, 362 (App. Div. 1998) required the Zoning Board hearings to begin anew. In this case, the lower Court found that a Zoning Board member whose mother and sister owned property fifty feet from the applicant’s site had an absolute, disqualifying and impermissible conflict of interest. In the Appellate Court decision, the judges found that the decisive factor is not actual conflict but whether there is potential for conflict. The potential for psychological influence could not be ignored, according to the ruling, and the Board’s approvals had to be invalidated.
On Friday, October 8, Stevens Institute and FBW were in court on another matter. In January of 2003, Stevens Institute filed a defamation lawsuit against FBW, its Executive Director and Board President for statements made about naturally-occurring asbestos being released into the air during the excavation of some 35,000 cubic yards of serpentine rock to make way for the parking garage . Although Superior Court Judge Camille Kenny threw out the defamation count last July, a final count of last resort, a prima facie tort, remains and lawyers for Stevens have engaged in a flurry of appeals, deposition requests and motions. Lawyers defending FBW have called this a SLAPP suit which is an acronym for Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation. In other words, it is a frivolous suit designed to suppress the defendants’ free speech right and to stifle an open public debate of the issues. At the Friday hearing, a new Judge declined to dismiss the final count ruling that discovery must be completed first.
For the past three years, FBW has been a vocal critic of three proposals put forth by Stevens Institute for the Hoboken waterfront, in addition to the parking garage. Stevens Institute’s other waterfront proposals, one for the Maxwell House property that it did not own, another, a large athletic facility at the Union Dry Dock site and a third, the 400-foot long Center for Maritime Systems, proposed between Sinatra and Castle Point Parks, have all fallen from their own weight.
Craig Whitaker, an urban planner and architect who developed FBW’s plan for the Hoboken waterfront in 1990, described the proposed garage as “a grossly inappropriate use, which will degrade the quality of the waterfront. Stevens wants to take a premier piece of real estate and erect an exposed, oversized parking garage, blighting the only truly public waterfront along New Jersey’s gold coast.”
The primary mission of FBW has been to complete Hoboken’s proposed continuous waterfront park that the group first proposed in 1990. From 1997 to the present, about 75% of this park has been built and much of the remainder is in the works, putting Hoboken far ahead of other Hudson River waterfront communities in terms of developing the waterfront in a manner that serves the public’s interest.