Grassroots Groundswell

The Green Brook Flood Control Commission meeting this evening was highly informative, well-run, organized, and respectful to all participants.

The North Plainfield representative, Councilman Frank Righetti, didn’t show up. Maybe he was too afraid to put in an appearance, once he heard that NPCCR representatives were going to be there.

Instead, someone in Borough Hall instructed Tina Totten, Administrative Assistant to the Mayor and Borough Administrator David Hollod, to send the following e-mail to the GBFC Chair Joe Debler (photo of the letter above).

Good morning Joe. Thank you so much for the email. We appreciate it.

This [NPCCR] is a political group of approximately 30 people who wanted an Ordinance passed that would be in violation of all state and local codes. They want plants and eco systems to have the same rights as people. The only businesses they want in town must be owned by a resident of North Plainfield. They wanted Villa Maria property for community farming. They also wanted to seceed [sic] from the State and the Union.

Tina Totten

Administrative Assistant

Mayor/Administrator

ttotten@npmail.org

Here’s a rebuttal:

The Allen Administration is an increasingly isolated political group of approximately 7 people who, over the course of more than six years, failed to erect a single municipal, financial, historical or environmental legal protection around Villa Maria, a beloved and ecologically vital community landmark. This same small, partisan special-interest group, in defiance of a vigorous citizen mandate for preservation, but at the behest of deep-pocket real estate developers, illegally adopted an Age Restricted Condo ordinance to promote slash and burn residential development at the site.

These individuals have no understanding and no experience implementing policies to promote healthy, open, accountable, local democracy; nurture and develop a healthy local economy; or contribute locally to the international work of preventing the most devastating consequences of global climate change from harming the health, safety and welfare of the residents of their community.

They also support the intolerable and anti-democratic notion that, contrary to the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the protections of the United States Constitution, the free and equal People of North Plainfield are no more than subservient royal subjects of the sovereign State of New Jersey and the corporate directors who write preemptive state laws adopted and implemented by the NJ State Legislature.

Readers looking for background are referred to:

• Villa Maria timeline
• The original proposal presented to the Borough Council on May 29, 2007 - Proposal - May 29, 2007
• The Self-Governance Ordinance initiative petition, signed by more than 600 North Plainfielders interested in saving Villa Maria during the summer of 2007, after the Mayor and Council expressed no interest in responsively exploring and implementing the ideas presented in the May 29 proposal.
• Petition Signature pages here:Petition Signers 1 —- Petition Signers 2
• Plaintiff’s Brief asserting the People’s right to self-govern. Plaintiff\’s Brief
• Defendants’ letter, accusing Plaintiff and all petition signatories of engaging in treason and sedition and threatening punishment for acts (circulating and signing an initiative petition) undertaken to assert our self-governing authority -Self-Governance Equals Sedition
• The Post-Mortem Chart - Post-Mortem Chart - showing all the decision points at which local leaders could have, BUT DIDN’T, respond to the demonstrated will of the People, which led the People to take the extreme step of proposing the Self-Governance Ordinance, which (among many other provisions) asserted, as our Revolutionary forbears did, our right to secede from higher levels government should those higher levels of government abuse the authority, power and trust placed in their hands by us, the People, the source of all legitimate political power.

Despite the courage of these hundreds of people, over more than half a decade, in the face of intimidation, threats, contempt, and ignoring by our “elected” local leaders, the property is owned by the real estate developer Robert McNerney, he’s applied for a DEP permit to demolish and deforest the land, and we’re now in the regulatory chute. (Why Regulatory Law Fails to Protect Local Communities)

The take home message of the Green Brook Flood Control Commission meeting was that those who still want to try to save Villa Maria - Property at 641 Somerset Street, Block 110, Lot 2, North Plainfield, Somerset County - should write letters, with as much supporting documentation as possible, as soon as possible, to:

Richard Reilly, Bureau Chief
Bureau of Inland Regulation
NJ Department of Environmental Protection
PO Box 402
401 East State Street, 7th floor
Trenton, NJ 08625-0402