COAH

“I don’t think Coldwell Banker wants to be associated with a politician who not only supported low income housing mandates, but tried to enable them by sponsoring legislation to have the state buy up foreclosed houses in suburban neighborhoods and sell them at reduced rates to low income buyers,” said Mecca.

New Jersey is in the ideal physical location to be the national economic leader among the states. It's not because of the public policies we have followed over the last eight years.

“When it comes to COAH,” said Caruso, “Scott Rumana is out in left field

The DEP commissioner has confirmed again that COAH's demands for affordable housing construction are based on sloppily collected and inaccurate data. When will the governor drop this job-killing COAH plan and create a plan for affordable housing that will work in any economy?

“What Scott Rumana doesn’t quite get is that there is only one right number for the COAH mandates – it’s zero,” said Rottino. “Municipalities and taxpayers should not be saddled with the responsibility and costs of building someone else a house.”

TRENTON – Sen. Jeff Van Drew along with his Assembly colleagues is sponsoring an omnibus bill that would significantly change New Jersey’s affordable housing laws, making homes available to people who need them while giving towns more flexibility in meeting their housing obligations.

“It’s been more than three decades since the New Jersey Supreme Court’s Mount Laurel decision on exclusionary zoning,” Senator Van Drew said today. “It’s clear the laws that have been enacted in response to that decision been more successful in building a thicket of rules and regulations than in building affordable housing. Though created with the best of intentions, the system New Jersey has now doesn’t work nearly as well as it should. It’s time to fix it.”

TRENTON – A bill (S-2485) sponsored by Sen. Raymond J. Lesniak (D-Union) that would exempt certain non-residential development projects from a 2.5 percent fee to fund affordable housing was approved 12-0 today by the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee.

Current law imposes a 2.5 percent non-residential development fee on certain projects to provide funding for the construction of affordable housing. The bill would exempt projects from the fee through July 2010.

“You would think that if he really did introduce legislation to abolish COAH, he would announce it to the world since COAH’s mandates are among the most unpopular regulations ever approved in New Jersey,” said Rottino. “Where did he announce his latest position on COAH in the men’s room at the statehouse? 

Rumana is supposed to be the Republican Assembly leader on COAH. He should have been investigating this long ago. He didn’t, and now he wants to spend more taxpayer money doing what he should have done. Right now he looks like a pretty inept leader”    

Fed Correction of Job Data Is More Evidence That Data Is Faulty