Spoiling for a fight

The next chapter of the Holuba Soap Factory saga is about to be written. Back in January, the property's owners seemed to have lost a key supporter when Council member Elnatan Rudolph bent to public pressure and released a statement declaring his opposition to the proposed residential development adjacent to Herrick Park. In the text of his statement, Rudolph suggested that "the owners of the property go back to the drawing board." Well, that they did, and neither residents nor local officials are going to like what they came up with.

Former Teaneck public information officer Stan Steinreich, who ended his working relationship with the town late last year somewhat acrimoniously, introduced the owners' latest idea for the property in his role as their public spokesman. Rather than a somewhat dense condominium development that would have required rezoning of their land, the owners plan a major industrial expansion on the site.

If you did not like our last idea, wait until you see what we're going to put in your backyard as an alternative, the Holubas seem to be saying. You think a few apartments and a bit of passenger car traffic would ruin the quality of life in your quiet suburb? How would you like to live and play beside a large chemical plant and a constant stream of tractor-trailers carrying hazardous materials coming and going all day?

Prediction: this rather transparent bullying attempt, a high stakes bluff if I have ever seen one, will backfire. The endgame in this ongoing public battle over the property was always going to be a face-saving compromise in which the owners would be able to build a slightly less profitable project than they had originally envisioned. The segment of the population (and municipal government) that is friendly to development was quietly supportive of the rights of the owners to build a reasonable development that would permit them to extract a good portion of the value from their property. Once the initial furor of the vocal neighborhood protest died down, the issue would have been quietly resolved in a mutually agreeable way that would be framed as a 'win-win' by Mayor Katz.

Now that the owners have forced the issue by resorting to threats, this outcome is far less certain. Telling the residents of an environmentally conscious, prosperous suburb with a lot of young families that you intend to place a large "chemical-industrial site" in their midst if you do not get your way is a good way to forfeit all of your public support, property rights be damned. The town will now face even greater pressure from residents to pull out all the stops in contesting the plans for the site. The Holubas appear to have guaranteed themselves a lengthy and expensive court battle by choosing the path of confrontation. Perhaps they should head "back to the drawing board" again.

Warning sign

It's not clear whether or not the abrupt resignation of Teaneck's public information officer is itself a good or a bad thing. Were the services of a public information officer necessary to begin with? There was not too much debate surrounding the appointment, which was made by the Council with little fanfare several months ago. It is similarly difficult to discern any impact from the public information efforts, as the position was apparently a behind the scenes one, which makes it hard to answer the question of whether the $11,000 spent on public relations was a good investment for Teaneck, or whether we are better off that the other $14,000 already allocated will remain in Teaneck's coffers for the time being.

What is abundantly clear, however, is that there was a major management failure here. When an external service provider opts to resign and forego future payments rather than continue to work with you, that is a sign that something is not right. In his comments to the Record, Stan Steinreich alleges that he was not even able to extract a cogent job description from those who had hired him.

If correct, this is a shocking revelation. It suggests that half-baked ideas are being approved and funded by our municipal government with no process in place for monitoring their implementation. This is not only a recipe for the failure of potentially good ideas, but it is supremely wasteful of scarce financial resources. One shudders to think what may be going on with the far more expensive Birdsall Engineering contract and other larger projects.