By John Tredrea, Staff Writer
The Hopewell Township Committee has decided to reduce significantly the scale of an effort to bring public sewer service to the southeastern section of the township.
The committee made that decision Monday night after enduring two hours of blistering criticism from scores of residents of the southeastern area. Many said they don’t need sewers and are nowhere near able to pay the kind of money the committee had told them it would take to get them.
The residents also were up in arms about the fact that the scrapped plan had enough treatment capacity for hundreds of new homes and commercial space equivalent to half the size of Merrill Lynch’s large Southfields office park, located off Scotch Road, between I-95 and Route 546.
Under the new plan it agreed to pursue at the end of the grueling session, the committee will propose to the Ewing-Lawrence Sewerage Authority (ELSA) that it only provide the township with enough treatment capacity for the businesses on and near the Pennington Circle that want sewer service, plus enough capacity for 180 affordable housing units on the Weidel tract, off the western side of Route 31, between I-95 and the circle.
“We’ll see what type of reaction we get from ELSA on just getting enough capacity for the businesses at the circle and the affordable units,” township Mayor Jim Burd said by telephone Tuesday morning. “We’re taking that approach because a lot of residents told us they don’t want the sewers and can’t afford them.”
The mayor predicted that, if the township decides to go back to ELSA at a later date to seek treatment capacity for residential areas that don’t want the treatment now, “it’ll cost more” than it would have this time around.
In an e-mail Tuesday morning, Committeewoman Vanessa Sandom said: “It is clear that the overwhelming number of residents in the proposed sewer service area are emphatically opposed” to the plan the township has decided to discard.
“It would be financially devastating to many of them, most don’t want the sewer service, and it would be completely inappropriate for the committee to impose that burden on them. We must go back to ELSA and obtain only the capacity we absolutely need, and no more,” she added.
The affordable housing units on the Weidel tract would help the township satisfy its state mandate to provide housing for low- and moderate-income residents.
The discarded plan called for ELSA bringing 266,000 gallons a day of sewage treatment capacity to the southeastern section. Given that 300 gallons per day of sewage treatment is considered adequate for one dwelling, the 266,000 gallons is enough for 888 dwelling units. In sewer parlance, those units are known as Equivalent Dwelling Units (EDUs).
The residential areas in line for sewer service under the scrapped plan included Indian Village, Diverty Road, and the streets on the eastern side of Route 31 between I-95 and the circle — Orchard and Crest avenues, Plymouth Street and Beech Street.
The EDU concept is an important one on this issue. There are 320 existing residences in the portion of the township that would have gotten sewers under the discarded plan and 16 existing non-residential structures. The residences account for one EDU each. The 16 existing non-residential structures account for 49 EDUs, since, on average, they each use would use considerably more than 300 gallons per day.
The grand total of existing residential and existing non-residential EDUs is only 369 EDUs. That means 519 EDUs in the southeastern section would be used by new development — 266 residences, including 180 affordable housing units on the Weidel Tract, and 243 EDUs for new non-residential development. Those 243 EDUs translate to enough sewage treatment for about 700,000 square feet of non-residential development, or about half the size of Merrill Lynch’s Southfields office park.
The EDU concept was key, because the concept would have been used to pay off the debt incurred by bringing in the sewers. The total cost of bringing them in under the scrapped plan was estimated at $22,550,000. The township would have borrowed that money. That debt would have been paid off, over a period of 18, years, by levying an annual special assessment, or tax, of $1,905 per EDU.
An illustrative example of what this could mean to some property owners is a lot, currently with just one house on it, that could hold four houses if the sewers were brought in (sewers permit much greater density of development than septic systems). Since that lot could have held four houses instead of one if the sewers were brought in, the owner of the lot would have to pay four times $1,905, or $7,620, in the special assessment each year for 18 years, unless he or she were given an exception of some kind. Important to note is that they would have to pay that amount regardless of whether they built any more houses on the lot or not.
That’s all on top of the thousands of dollars it would cost anyone to physically connect into the sewer system, and public water system that would come with it, plus about $1,000 annually per home for water and sewer bills.
Relieved that the Township Committee had changed its mind, Plymouth Street resident Paul Kiss said in an e-mail to the committee after adjournment Monday night: “Thank you for listening to us and making the effort to work with us on this vitally important decision. After the meeting, I heard many previously cynical people express hope that maybe their voices can be heard, and that maybe their committee does care. Please continue down the path you started on at the end of the meeting. Explore alternatives. Don’t be held hostage by ELSA, don’t be afraid to say no to sewers and development! We stand behind you, and are depending on you.”
The municipal auditorium was packed to standing-room-only capacity by about 100 people Monday night. Scores of speakers told the committee the now-scrapped plan was unfair and unreasonable, would be a financial disaster to many them and would bring a flood of unwanted residential and commercial development.
All the speakers had their say before the committee decided, at the very end of the marathon meeting, to reduce the plan to one seeking sewers only for businesses at the circle and the affordable housing units.
Orchard Avenue resident Eric Wells said he did a door-to-door survey of his neighborhood. He got 52 responses. “Fifty said they didn’t want sewers, one did, and one didn’t respond,” he told the HVN.
“The community basically doesn’t want sewers,” added Plymouth Street resident John Connor. “It’s not broke, don’t fix it.” His statement against the scrapped plan, like many other statements made Monday night, was followed by loud applause and vigorous cheering from the gallery.
“It seems funny we’re being lassoed into this picture when we don’t want sewers,” said Joseph Dutko, who lives on Route 31 between the circle and I-95. “If the township as a whole needs it (for the affordable units), then the township as a whole should be assessed to pay for it.”
“I’m against it. I can’t afford it,” said Daniel Marina of Indian Village. “We’ll probably have to sell our house if you do it.””This is a very hard time economically for people,” said Geri Estren Brown of Diverty Road. “Gas is going up. The real estate market is depressed. It would be imposing a hardship on working people. We’re not rich people. We are the affordable housing of Hopewell Township. More development would further deteriorate our quality of life.”
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