Bill > S162

Introduced Session

This bill refines the procedure established by the New Jersey Supreme Court in its March 2015 opinion concerning the role of the courts and the Council on Affordable Housing ("COAH") in overseeing exclusionary zoning disputes. In its opinion, the Supreme Court properly looked to the manner in which the Legislature structured the "Fair Housing Act," P.L.1985, c.222 (C.52:27D-301 et al.) ("FHA") to establish a procedure for municipalities under the jurisdiction of COAH to comply in an analogous procedure before a trial judge. More specifically, the Supreme Court gave municipalities that were under COAH's jurisdiction but did not receive substantive certification, five months to prepare and file a housing element and fair share plan with a trial judge consistent with sections 9 and 16 of the FHA, P.L.1985, c.222 (C.52:27D-309 and C.52:27D-316), which gave municipalities five months to file a plan with COAH. Through sections 9 and 16 of the FHA, P.L.1985, c.222 (C.52:27D-309 and C.52:27D-316), the Legislature intended to give municipalities five months to file an affordable housing plan from the point that COAH established the criteria and guidelines with which municipalities must comply. Thus, municipalities would have five months to develop a plan consistent with COAH guidelines and the process of securing plan approval, and then commencing implementation in accordance with section 14 of the FHA, P.L.1985, c.222 (C.52:27D-314), could proceed efficiently. This bill will eliminate any possibility, however remote, that a trial judge would interpret the Supreme Court opinion to require the five-month period to prepare an affordable housing plan to commence before such time as the trial judge has established the criteria and guidelines - including, most importantly, the fair share number - with which the municipality must comply. Through this bill, the Legislature seeks merely to ensure that the procedure that trial judges implement is consistent with the FHA and promotes the efficiencies essential to avoiding a great waste of the public's finite resources. Other prudent considerations make it essential that the five-month period commence with the trial judge's establishment of criteria and guidelines. At taxpayers' expense and in good faith, hundreds of municipalities prepared and supplemented affordable housing plans to achieve compliance with COAH rule multiple times only to subsequently find that they had to redo these plans because the courts repeatedly invalidated the regulations upon which the municipalities based their plans. Municipalities have finite resources and must use them for the protection of public health, safety, and welfare. The preparation of affordable housing plans to meet established standards for the production of affordable housing is an appropriate use of those finite resources and promotes the public welfare, but the preparation of affordable housing plans in the absence of all of the standards with which the municipality must comply is not.

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Committee Categories

Christopher Bateman (R)*,  Linda Greenstein (D)*,  Bob Singer (R), 

Introduced in the Senate, Referred to Senate Community and Urban Affairs Committee (on 01/12/2016)