Several borough ordinances are outdated and/or overly punitive which causes significant headache and financial costs for average everyday citizens trying to live and improve their respective homes. Updating these regulations and streamlining borough transactions will greatly improve quality of life for citizens.
For example:
- Alpine’s septic code is twice (2x) more onerous than that of the State of NJ (note: when I asked the prior health inspector why this was the case, the answer I received was highly unsatisfactory.)
- Soil movement, even to fill eroded areas, requires permitting, fees, approvals, etc.
- Establishing term limits to empower our community to attract new talent, gain new ideas, refresh motivation, and achieve a higher level of civic engagement.
Another important item is to incorporate beneficial new ordinances. For example, requiring a large-scale real estate development to include a traffic impact study, school impact statement, municipal services study, etc. and to have qualified professionals provide potential remedies before permitting is completed and ground breaking commences is prudent. As denoted above, much of this information is not available for the Lilly Pond Estates development project.
I also believe in term limits for elected politicians. By imposing finite durations, our community benefits from new ideas, motivation, and a level of enthusiasm that typically dissipates with the passage of time. Our collective effort will automatically shift towards helping establish a robust pipeline of potential future leaders that are actively involved and acutely aware of the issues which our community faces.
