EMERSON—The Borough Council emerged from a closed executive session on Dec. 28, 2021 and unanimously approved one resolution related to affordable housing and another related to property deeded to the Emerson Station redevelopment.
Resolution 269-21, moved by Kenneth Hoffman and seconded by Jill McGuire, was approved, 6-0, authorizing Mayor Danielle DiPaola to “sign the deed to vacate Kenneth Avenue” and provide that property to Accurate Builders, a subsidiary of JMF Properties, which is handling construction of Emerson Redevelopers Urban Renewal’s Emerson Station.
A 45-page redevelopment agreement, approved several years ago, outlines the borough’s partner’s obligations, starting with acquiring nine parcels from six property owners, now complete. The firm aims to overhaul the western side of the county’s Kinderkamack Road between Linwood Avenue and Lincoln Boulevard and NJ Transit’s Pascack Valley Line.
The approved mixed-use proposal includes a multi-story, 147-unit luxury rental complex with 15,000 square feet of ground-level retail space. It includes 29 affordable units, 22 to be built onsite and seven elsewhere in town, and a parking garage.
Kenneth Avenue originally ran behind all of the business/residential properties on Kinderkamack Road that comprise the Block 419 area of the project.
It also accessed the former Emerson Volunteer Ambulance Corps (EVAC) headquarters, at 1 Kenneth Ave., and a commuter lot. The road has been closed since demolition work began in 2019 on a redevelopment project stalled by legal delays and recent contamination found at a former dry cleaner site.
In October 2021, after EVAC said its temporary accommodations at a borough-owned house on Locust Avenue, at the rec center, and at the DMF were insufficient, DiPaola and Borough Administrator Robert Hermansen said the borough would see to improvements.
Currently, rigs are being housed at the DPW headquarters, although no lockers are on site for personnel — and neither were showers nor cots provided, corps members said.
They worried the conditions were harming membership efforts.
In exchange for the deed, the redeveloper was to provide $500,000 in construction services to the borough for an ambulance building elsewhere. But due to the developer’s requirement that the borough provide a design for the facility by the end of 2019 — a deadline the borough did not meet — the developer has refused to provide the payment.
The matter is being contested in Superior Court in Hackensack, with the borough and developer blaming each other for the dispute.
Meanwhile, new facilities for the ambulance corps are being added to design plans for an improved and expanded Borough Hall, where improvements for the police and court functions also are long overdue.
The resolutions signed Dec. 28 do not resolve any pending legal action, DiPaola told Pascack Press on Jan. 4.
Emerson Station has been the focus of multiple lawsuits, with the developer suing the borough, asserting obstruction and racial animus and the borough claiming the developer has presented no evidence to back its charges and only wants to delay the project — possibly to reduce the retail component originally promised.
In late October 2021, construction code official Richard Silvia told the council that the project had been halted after the finding of perchlorethylene, a common toxic cleaning agent, in soil beneath the former Ranch Cleaners, at 190 Kinderkamack Road.
Public testimony in 2019 from a resident had suggested that the site might be contaminated but the developer claimed then that it was clean.
In late November and December, demolition work on that site appeared to resume. Calls by Pascack Press to Silvia’s office to update the project’s status were not returned and it was unclear whether soil remediation was required or not.
In October, Silvia said the licensed site remediation professional (LSRP) for Emerson Station found the soil contamination and turned the results over to DEP.
The LSRP is responsible for managing site environmental testing and any cleanup required by DEP. Working with DEP, the LSRP must determine how to remedy any existing soil contamination to meet DEP standards.
At the Oct. 19 meeting, DiPaola wondered why soil testing at the dry cleaner site had occurred only recently.
Silvia noted he had told prior construction superintendents to do environmental testing there but that no action had been taken.
As a councilwoman and mayoral candidate, DiPaola argued against the scope of the redevelopment project and the process by which it came to be. She has since been named in legal action, along with the borough, filed by the Emerson Station redeveloper.
Resolution 268-21, also signed Jan. 3, created an affordable housing subcommittee for 2022, composed of councilmembers Jill McGuire and Michael Timmerman, affordable housing attorney Brian Giblin of Giblin & Gannaio of Oradell, borough planner Caroline Reiter of Statile Associates of Oakland, and DiPaola.
— With John Snyder