Step by Step

Here’s the plan for moving forward with the Borough Administrator, Borough Council and Mayor to craft a workable, community-supported solution to the Villa Maria development challenge:

1) The Villa Maria property is currently generating tax revenue for the town, may generate additional tax revenue if we are able to seek back taxes, and the property as-is requires very few town services and is not a drain on local resources. Therefore, the Borough is under no time pressure to facilitate the damaging development currently sought by the landowners. We have time to find ways to increase the pressure on the nuns to cooperate with our vision for the Borough in making their sale/development plans.

2) Our community vision for the Borough places a high value on open space conservation and historic preservation, in concert with sustainable economic development that maintains and enhances the unique character of the Borough.

3) We have already begun sending out feelers to locate potential buyers who could pay a fair price – not the exorbitant profits offered by the condo developers, but a reasonable price factoring in the decades of tax-exemption and the current back taxes owed – to buy the wooded land, conserve the trees, and renovate the eclectic mix of existing historic buildings for a variety of uses including schools, nursing homes/assisted living, conference centers, hotels, bed and breakfasts, upscale professional office space, upscale historic apartments.

We continue to urge all interested NP residents to spread the word among your business and personal networks that we’re looking for a collaborative solution to this community challenge, and to help interested parties get involved in good faith negotiations with the landowners.

4) However, to move forward with developing those leads, our group needs to know and fully understand exactly what has occurred during the last five to seven years of negotiations between the Borough and the landowners. What have the nuns’ stated goals been? Who has corresponded and/or attended meetings related to Villa Maria development and in what capacity? What hurdles have the landowners thrown up to development proposals more compatible with our community vision, how and why? What environmental, legal and other problems have come up, and how have those limited the proposals in the past? And many other issues.

5) Therefore, before we arrange a CCR meeting with Borough Administrator David Hollod and the Borough Council, we need unrestricted access to public documents, correspondence, meeting minutes, reports, etc., shedding light on all that background, so we can analyze and identify the bargaining strengths and weaknesses of all the current players: the Borough, the landowning nuns, and the condo developers, to craft a well-informed, workable proposal that factors in the key problems and opportunities.

6) We notified Borough Administrator David Hollod of this requirement in writing yesterday, seeking a combination of extensive document review and candid interviews with knowledgeable Borough officials, and are awaiting his response to schedule those information-gathering sessions at his earliest convenience, hopefully for sometime late this week or early next week.

Here are some other subjects our group can research independently:

1) How much back taxes can the Borough pursue under federal tax law?

2) Are buyers who were interested earlier in the process still interested?

3) Are pharmaceutical companies or philanthropists interested in financing a historic project to purchase and restore Villa Maria as a historic landmark? (Antoinette is writing letters)

4) What other uses would be permitted for the property under current zoning?

Any light readers can shed on these questions would help the process move along.

Also, reader ideas will be posted as “So-and-so’s Ideas” as regular posts if you e-mail them in.