One of New Jersey’s wealthiest towns is being ordered to pay more than $100,000 in legal fees, following an effort to block affordable housing development there.
An Essex County Superior Court judge on Aug. 1 ordered Millburn Township — a tony North Jersey suburb located a half-hour train ride from New York City’s Midtown — to pay roughly $115,000 to the developer and a housing nonprofit involved in the case. The ruling is part of an ongoing yearslong battle over a proposal to build a 75-unit affordable housing complex in downtown Millburn.
Last month, the judge dealt the town a blow by ordering Millburn’s political leaders to readopt the original agreement for the Main Street project and move forward with the development plan. The project site is on part of the property currently occupied by the town’s Department of Public Works.
Now, Judge Cynthia Santomauro has sided with the developer, RPM, and the nonprofit Fair Share Housing Center on the question of attorney costs. Taxpayers will effectively have to foot the bill.
Millburn Mayor Annette Romano and the town’s attorney, Jarrid Kantor, did not respond to a request for comment on the judge’s latest order.
Gothamist has chronicled the ongoing fight in Millburn Township, where homes go for more than $1 million on average, over the plans for the fully affordable apartment complex. The battle reached a fever pitch earlier this year when the township committee voted to rescind its development agreement for the project after years of defying court orders.
The saga in Millburn serves as a cautionary tale for other New Jersey neighborhoods that will soon find out how much affordable housing they’re required to build under state guidelines.
The decades-old Mount Laurel Doctrine gives towns minimum affordable housing goals in an effort to equitably distribute housing development. New Jersey is expected to unveil the next round of requirements in late October.
Places like Millburn, a township that has built almost no affordable housing in the last 40 years and includes the state’s wealthiest ZIP code, could be assigned to develop hundreds of units of affordable housing over the next decade. The situation there stands out as an example of what could happen if municipalities try to thwart the Mount Laurel guidelines.
In court filings, Santomauro said she was prepared to further sanction the township, including fining the town daily, if it takes more than 30 days to sign off on the original agreement for the project with RPM.
“Hopefully this project will start right away,” she said at a July 10 hearing. “There is really no reason to hold it up.”
Josh Bauers, an attorney for Fair Share Housing Center, noted that according to its own housing plan, Millburn “actually picked [the] site” on Main Street in 2021. He said the judge wasn’t asking the town to do anything it hadn’t previously agreed to do.
“I think there’s a view that the court is somehow ordering the town to do something that is sort of violating their right to make decisions for themselves, and that’s just not the case,” said Bauers.
While rare, it’s not unprecedented for New Jersey judges to order a town to pay fees to other parties in affordable housing disputes.
In 2022, a former attorney for Englewood Cliffs said the town’s legal maneuvering to resist affordable housing development had cost the town more than $1 million in attorney fees. Earlier this year, a judge ordered Wayne to pay $141,000 to a developer after concluding that the town excessively delayed a project.
After the July court hearing where the judge said she was ordering Millburn to move forward with the development plan, Kantor told residents at a town meeting that the committee was weighing its legal options. Some residents urged the members to continue to fight.
On July 31, Santomauro officially filed her order stating that Millburn had 30 days to adopt an agreement with RPM for the 100% affordable development.