Clashes over democracy, continuity at historic Radburn

During a recent tour of Fair Lawn’s Radburn neighborhood, Philip Plotch and Art Murray moved briskly along narrow footpaths and tidy parkland until they came to a squat pedestrian tunnel dipping beneath Howard Avenue, one of Radburn’s main arteries.

The tunnel’s colorful murals stood out even in the dull December light, and the proud guides, both longtime residents, paused there to describe how the simple stone underpass was key to Radburn’s original genius — and enduring legacy — as a community that enjoys the near-complete separation of pedestrian and vehicular traffic.

Touted upon its creation in 1929 as a “Town for the Motor Age,” Radburn also boasts 18 acres of internal parks, a shopping plaza, an elementary school and other remnants of the founders’ ambitious attempt to create a self-sufficient community. It has become perhaps the most significant site in 20th century American planning and, despite its age, continues in much its original form.

For more than a decade, however, pressure has been mounting from a group of residents to change a feature of Radburn’s oversight body that has allowed the community to experience an uncommon degree of continuity. After years of reluctance, Sen. Bob Gordon, D-Fair Lawn, is sponsoring a bill that would change how residents are elected to Radburn’s board of trustees, which levies annual assessments, manages common land and, crucially, controls architectural alterations.

Residents who support the legislation, led by Plotch and Murray, frequently blast the board for a perceived lack of transparency and say it should be more open to new people and new ideas.

“I don’t think anyone, even the people who are advantaged by the current system, would approve of it if they were on the other side of it,” said Murray, himself a former trustee. “This is an antique form of government.”

But critics of Gordon’s bill, which has already passed the Senate and could receive a vote in the Assembly later this month, say the legislation could irrevocably compromise Radburn’s historic character. It could also herald a push for more comprehensive reforms to the laws governing New Jersey’s estimated 7,000 common interest communities in 2017.

“If we have a change in our governance structure, down the line they could change the bylaws, they could change the architectural guidelines,” Marion Paganello, the current vice president of the board, said in an interview last month. “Our system of governance works. We’re here. We’re 87 years old.”

'One-party system'

Roughly one in seven New Jersey residents live in common-interest communities, such as co-ops, condos, planned developments or lake associations, where they pay a maintenance fee in exchange for access to shared amenities or resources. In the vast majority of those communities, anyone who owns a unit is considered a member and can run to serve on a board overseeing the community’s finances and policy.

Not so in Radburn. As provided for in the original deed restriction, Radburn is overseen by a non-profit corporation known as the Radburn Association, whose membership is limited to current and former trustees. In a community of roughly 3,100 people — about the same size as Moonachie, Saddle River or Haworth — the number of voting members, meaning current or former trustees who still live in Radburn, is about 40, said Radburn Manager David Bostock.

As a corporation, the Radburn Association is not subject to the same laws as public entities like town councils or planning boards even though it performs some of the same functions. Members of the Radburn Association, for example, are able to hand-pick two of the nine people who sit on the board of trustees every year.

Another six trustees are elected by residents from a list of candidates that has been previously vetted by the sitting trustees.

Only one board member, by becoming president of a separate organization called the Radburn Citizens’ Association, can serve without prior vetting.

“What we are trying to do is encompass this shifting perspective while maintaining the community and the stability,” Paganello said, adding that “every homeowner who buys a home in Radburn is supposed to be apprised by their lawyer and real estate agent that this is what you’re buying into.”

But Plotch said that the vetting process is frequently used to exclude candidates who are critical of the board and that, under the current system, residents have little power to hold trustees accountable.

“It’s sort of a one-party system and when people ask for change, they sort of scare people,” Plotch said of the trustees. “They tell the people if we have democratic elections it’s going to destabilize society, it’s going to disturb the culture, it’s going to empower the wrong type of people.”

Starting last year, Plotch and other residents ramped up their efforts to convince Gordon, a former resident of Radburn, to do something to open up the election process.

“Literally 60 people showed up at my office,” Gordon said in a recent interview. “In the 13 years of being in the Legislature, I had never had any issue that elicited that kind of response.”

His bill, drafted with Radburn in mind, would define all unit owners in common interest communities as members and allow them to run for board seats without being vetted. The vast majority of such communities in New Jersey already meet those standards, he said.

“There are fears that somehow the world is going to change, the sky is going to fall, if we change the nomination process,” Gordon testified in front of an Assembly panel last month, referring to Radburn. “Everything is not going to change. The only thing that will change is that the process will become much more open and anyone will be able to serve on the board if they can get elected.”

Battles over development

The current rancor over the election process has its roots in a 2004 decision by the board of trustees to sell a parcel of land adjacent to Radburn for the construction of town houses and apartments.

Then, as now, trustees and residents clashed over the role of democratic principles in Radburn and how best to preserve the historic neighborhood.

Trustees announced the sale of the 5.7-acre Daly Field only after it was a done deal. The roughly $4 million gained through the sale would help keep assessments down, they said at the time, and the secret nature of the negotiations had allowed them to reach an agreement with the developer to construct housing that would be architecturally consistent with the rest of Radburn.

But many residents were furious that the deal had gone through without their being consulted and argued that the property should remain as open space. Being unable to vote certain trustees off the board frustrated them further.

“Not having that debate essentially created a terrible problem,” Murray recalled of the turmoil in the wake of the board’s decision. “They had a right to make it. They should have made it publicly.”

A group of residents challenged the legality of the Radburn Association’s governance structure in court and lost after a protracted and expensive series of appeals. But that battle paved the way for the current one.

“Characterizing Radburn's current system of nomination as oligarchic or paternalistic or elitist or being out of step with the times does not, in my view, render it illegal,” Superior Court Judge Robert P. Contillo wrote in a 2008 ruling, a passage that was later quoted in a 2010 appellate division decision. “I can divine no legislative warrant for the mandatory restructuring of Radburn and therefore decline to impose it by judicial order. If the unit owners want reform, they must petition their elected representatives in Trenton.”

More recently, the board of trustees’ architectural committee was in the news for denying an application to build a playground in a park it controls outside the Radburn Elementary School. Students there who had helped raise some $40,000 for the project were so upset that they started chanting, “We want our playground!”

“We are trying to preserve and protect the beauty of our parks and not mar them with this big, plastic, sprawling playground,” Paganello said about the decision. Speaking more broadly, she added, “There are many emotional and personal issues that, we’re not trying to discredit them, but we have to try to think of the larger picture.”

She said the trustees are currently working with the Fair Lawn Board of Education to find a more suitable location for the playground elsewhere on school grounds.

Reform of 'paramount importance'

The conflict within Radburn over its governance structure points to a larger problem with how the state regulates its estimated 7,000 common interest communities, said David Ramsey, an attorney and member of the Community Associations Institute, which advocates nationally for such associations and helped draft Gordon’s legislation.

“Right now, New Jersey has kind of this patchwork of legislation that is not consistent from one type of association to another, and that confuses people,” he said. For example, different rules apply to condominium as opposed to homeowners’ associations.

A better set of statutes, he said, “needs to not only unify the laws, but make clear what the powers and authority of the association is and what the rights of the unit owners are. It needs to strike a good balance between the two. And we don’t have that today.”

He said he hopes Gordon’s bill, which “strikes the right balance,” will create momentum for more comprehensive reforms in 2017.

In October, the state Law Revision Commission proposed a legislative framework that would help lawmakers overhaul how it regulates the state’s various types of common-interest communities. It called the effort of “paramount importance” given the number of people who live in them.

Ramsey said the Community Associations Institute supports the commission’s framework and that a foundational reform bill is “ready to go” as soon as lawmakers are willing to take it up.

But resistance to Gordon’s more limited bill could foreshadow even more forceful resistance to comprehensive reform by other common interest communities around the state. That dynamic — numerous communities objecting to provisions that would force them to change — crippled a similar reform effort in the Legislature about a decade ago.

“We would really like to be left alone to solve this problem in our community,” Paganello said, referring to Gordon’s bill. “We feel we’re better equipped to deal with that and to do it properly.”

At the request of the trustees, Gordon is scheduled to discuss the bill with residents on Thursday during a meeting at the Fair Lawn Community Center.

Paganello declined to elaborate on what an in-house solution would look like but said the trustees had recently taken steps to be more transparent by updating Radburn’s website, setting up a Facebook page and hiring a public relations firm.

“It’s not that the people who are promoting this bill don’t love this community,” she said. “We understand that they love it, too. We just have a different idea of what’s good for the community.”

Email: pugliese@northjersey.com