The Future of Holmdel

“…no cannonballs did fly, no rifles cut us down.

No bombs fell from the sky, no blood soaked the ground.

No powder flash blinded the eye, no deathly thunder sounded,

But just as sure as the hand of God they brought death to my home town…”

Death to My Home Town— Bruce Springsteen, from the album Wrecking Ball

In the late 1950s the drug Thalidomide was used as a sleep aid and morning sickness remedy. Many pregnant women used it for the latter. About 10,000 children were born with horrific birth defects attributed to the drug, many missing limbs. Thalidomide was found to inhibit vascularization and thus extremity development.

In the 1990s Thalidomide was found to be one of the most effective drugs to treat multiple myeloma. By inhibiting vascularization, it impeded the growth of rapidly multiplying cancer cells which require enhanced blood supply to proliferate.

An analogy can be drawn to roads and sewers that can promote over-development.

In the past Holmdel had been accused of exclusionary zoning in losing court battles for large lot zoning. It became apparent Holmdel needed a different strategy to slow development that imperiled the rural nature of the town. Through open space preservation and limiting infrastructure such as road extent and size and sewers, development could be controlled and contained and the town could have a consistent policy with an environmental rationale: protection of the streams and estuaries that feed the Swimming River Reservoir.

The claim that development can be protected with zoning instead of a consistent, environmentally supported land use policy has been disproved by Holmdel and Marlboro history. Holmdel has been able to keep high density development in northern Holmdel, but that will change as sewers are extended in the south and Mt. Laurel rises from the dead in some form.

Middletown recently rejected a proposal for building 342 residential units on the Avaya site in Lincroft 1 mile from Crawfords Corner and Route 520. Though the skirmish was won, the battle is far from over. You can be sure there will eventually be about 200 units.About 1 mile from Avaya there will be 190 units built on Bamm Hollow on Holmdel’s border. Add to that the 225 units proposed for Lucent and you have over 600 units in the Holmdel area and immense pressure for expanded infrastructure. Anyone with any semblance of intelligence can gauge the effect on home values, sales, and property taxes in this area.

Public displeasure at a 10.8% property tax increase is causing a blundering governing body to lose all sense of caution in allowing development on the Lucent site. Suddenly the Impreveduto Administration will support sewer expansion imperiling the entire area to high density development citing “data” he studied which contradicts long accepted data from experts and the very data from Holmdel itself. In the governing body’s haste to achieve a ratable that in all likelihood will not be realized for half a decade, the development is suddenly outside the oval of the Lucent building and the residential component has ballooned back to what other would be developers proposed.

Somehow the governing body thinks residential housing is a ratable. Somehow they missed the data showing that residential units generate $1.25 to $1.35 in costs for infrastructure for every property tax dollar collected. The panacea of “senior housing” has been exposed as a Trojan horse when homes do not sell. With 600 total residential units in the vicinity, I predict Crawfords Corner will become a major traffic corridor necessitating a widening of the road. I predict you will see Exit 116 on the Parkway: “Holmdel, Middletown, Crawfords Corner.” There will be traffic congestion by our schools. Homes will remain for sale, unsold for years. Double digit property tax increases will be the rule, not the exception. Water supply will become an issue both in quantity and quality making it more expensive. This “plan” for Holmdel will put a dagger through the heart of Holmdel.

Voters need to send a message in November that we desperately need to do better than this. We need elected officials that make informed decisions based on fact not political expediency. We need our officials to take ownership of the process and not hand it off to professionals. And we need a more deliberative and engaging process.