Senate will consider bill to abolish COAH

by: Jason Springer

Thu Jan 21, 2010 at 12:15:00 PM EST

An effort to abolish the state Council on Affordable housing will begin Feb. 1 when the state Senate Economic Growth Committee will begin hearing testimony on bipartisan legislation that would eliminate the agency.

Under the bill, affordable housing issues would be handled by the State Planning Commission.

Sen. Raymond J. Lesniak (D-Union), the committee chairman and co-sponsor of the bill (S-1) with Sen. Christopher "Kip'' Bateman (R-Somerset), announced the hearing Wednesday.

"The purpose of this bill is to repeal COAH's top down, micro-managed, and complex bureaucracy,'' Lesniak said. "For decades, COAH has burdened property taxpayers with millions of dollars in unnecessary cost of compliance by municipalities with its maze of ever-changing rules and regulations. And, COAH has discouraged job creation by adding housing requirements and fees based on the number of jobs created and private dollars invested.

The Lesniak-Bateman proposal would allow municipalities to decide if they if they have already met their affordable housing goals and could adopt a simple ordinance to declare their compliance.

If a municipality finds that it does not meet housing requirements, it must adopt an ordinance to that effect and work to meet the standards prescribed by law. Municipalities that fail to adopt an ordinance would be subject to a use variance wherein a housing development would be deemed to have met affordable housing requirements to obtain a use variance by a low- and moderate-income housing component of the development application.