February 9th Meeting Summary

The Verona Town Council met on February 9th. The following is a summary of what we discussed.

We continue to advance many elements of our Fair Share Housing Plan, which requires zoning changes to be adopted by mid-March. Several actions were taken at our meeting.

• We introduced changes to our zoning code for the Town Center District. This includes updating acceptable uses in the zone and removing the "equal distribution of uses" clause that currently exists. That will allow for more housing to be built, and property owners can build retail on the first floor and then two additional floors of housing. See the details of this ordinance in the agenda. If you have any comments, I strongly suggest you make them at the upcoming Planning Board meeting when they review this ordinance.

• A second ordinance that was introduced is for a redevelopment plan of 176 Bloomfield Avenue, which is next to Everett Field. As you can recall, this property was the subject of long standing litigation which the Council voted to settle on several months ago. This redevelopment plan is also going to the Planning Board for review.

• Under resolutions, we declared 420 Bloomfield Avenue (aka Richfield Regency) a non-condemnation area in need of redevelopment. Expect that we will introduce a re-development plan for this site at an upcoming meeting.

If residents want to provide meaningful feedback on any of our housing plans, I strongly encourage you to keep track of the meetings of the Planning Board, and attend in person to provide public comment. Their meeting schedule can be found here: https://www.veronanj.org/planningboard.

Other significant actions taken at this meeting:

• The Council approved the franchise agreement with Comcast.

• There was a hearing and then a vote on our 2026 Community Development Block Grant Application. For 2026, we are applying to develop accessible parking for Peckman Park - which is located off of Commerce Drive.

• We had several resolutions to combine separate bonds into aggregate bonds for the purposes of moving to long-term financing

• The Council voted to issue a certificate of completion on the Verona Flats development and release the bond to the developer (I abstained from both votes).

• We applied for a 2026 Local Recreation Improvement Grant for the re-surfacing of Centennial Field.

• The Council authorized a purchase of a vehicle for the Fire Prevention department, which was included in our 2025 capital plan.

We had several conversations of interest for the public.

At the top of the meeting, the Neighborhood Traffic and Safety Committee had a short presentation on a potential Complete Streets policy (30 minutes into the meeting). This policy would serve as a toolbox of strategies the Township could deploy to make our streets and sidewalks safer for all users. Having this policy in place will allow us to strengthen discussions with developers over safety and expand our ability to apply for certain traffic and safety grants. This is the second time we have discussed this policy, as some of my peers have concerns with the content. We had a lively discussion at the meeting, which I encourage you to watch. In the end, we agreed that some small adjustments may be made so that we can move this policy to adoption.

At the end of the meeting, we had some new business discussions as well.

The Administration would like for us to considering making some changes to fees.

• Adding a fee for OPRA requests that require the editing of police bodycam footage.

• Adding fees for residential and commercial certificates of compliance

• Increasing the final reading for water usage from $25 to $50

• Formalizing transaction fees for payments that are being made by credit card, online payments, and e-checks.

Other ordinance changes being proposed by the Administration include making some adjustments to our lead based paint hazard inspection requirements to allow for us to move some of these inspections in house, and changes to the zoning code to modify who is issuing building permits and certificates of occupancy.

If you have any comments on these upcoming changes or any matter before the Council, please send us all feedback by using the convenient form located here: https://www.veronanj.org/councilcontactform.

Our next meeting is Monday, February 23rd, when we will start to discuss our annual budget.