Hey Jennings - the meetings were not "out of town" - White Meadow Lake is Rockaway Twp. yet again misleading headlines and hype from the Daily Disaster.

Mega-church hearings back in town

Sagging attendance behind shift to Rockaway Twp.

By Rob Jennings, Daily Record

ROCKAWAY TWP. - The 16th public planning board hearing on Christ Church of Montclair's building plan, which is proceeding despite a federal lawsuit filed by the church, will be the first held in smaller quarters at the township's municipal building.

Planning board chairman Mort Dicker attributed the location shift to declining attendance at Christ Church hearings - from more than 1,000 people at the first hearing on Dec. 15, 2003, to approximately 85 people at each of the past two hearings.

The 5,000-member church's building plan - highlighted by a 2,512-seat sanctuary, private K-5 school and recreational facilities at the 107-acre, former Agilent Technologies site on Green Pond Road - has drawn extensive local attention and resulted in the formation of an opposition group, Voices of Rockaway Township.

Crowds at the hearings were once so large that the only way the board could find adequate space was to move the hearings out of Rockaway Township, to Morris Knolls High School in Denville. The high school's auditorium can accommodate up to 1,200 people.

After the sixth hearing drew 175 people, the board returned the hearings to Rockaway Township - but to the Copeland Middle School's gymnasium, not the municipal building.

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The next hearing on May 2, the first since Christ Church filed a lawsuit on April 15, will be held in the municipal building's hearing room - ordinarily the venue from planning board hearings. The township clerk's office said the room has a maximum capacity of 150 people.

Holding hearings elsewhere posed both logistic and cost challenges to the township. The hearing room, for example, is equipped with a recording system and public hearings at Morris Knolls and Copeland had to be coordinated in conjunction with school events.

Charles Mueller, a resident who opposes the Christ Church building plan, said it would be a mistake to infer that the declining attendance signaled any weakening in local resistance to the building plan.

Christ Church spokesman Marc Weinstein has said that only a small percentage of residents oppose its plan.

"I think it's just a matter of that people have a lot of other things to do on a Monday night than to sit through boring meetings," Mueller said. "The meetings have been very slow and very boring."

Mueller speculated there might be a surge in attendance at the May 2 hearing, in part because the church's lawsuit has sparked renewed interest in the controversy.

If more people were to show up than could be safely accommodated in the room, the hearing might have to be postponed.

Demonstrate support

Mueller said he would attend to demonstrate support for the board, named along with the township mayor, council and environmental commissioner in the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Newark.

"With everything going on, it's important to show the planning board and town - they're all being sued, and they're really being threatened with being sued individually - that the town is behind them," Mueller said.

The lawsuit accuses the township of violating the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000, as well as the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

It cites the council's March 1 vote to amend a local zoning ordinance - a decision affecting the church building plan; alleged encouragement by township officials of a misinformation campaign and a planning board inquiry into whether "mega-churches" qualified as churches under local zoning.

Township officials have said they are treating the church fairly, and Dicker said Friday that their objectivity would continue when the church resumes presenting traffic testimony on May 2.

"I don't see any reason for the board to dismiss this case because they've instigated litigation," Dicker said. "We're bound by what the law is, what the ordinances are. That's the way we've been handling this case since the beginning."

Worsen traffic

Opponents to the church building plan have said it would worsen traffic and hurt an environmentally sensitive location. The church has said the traffic impact would be manageable and said that its plan would include an environmental cleanup at the site.

Weinstein said the church's traffic engineer, Karl Pehnke, will resume testifying on May 2. He added that the church's pastor, David Ireland, planned to attend.

Both Weinstein and Dicker acknowledged the lawsuit would amplify an already strained atmosphere, even if neither Christ Church nor the board were to allude to it at the next hearing.

"It's sort of like you have an elephant in the room," Weinstein said.

"It's awkward," Dicker said. "I think every one of us is fair-minded. We do the best that we can under the circumstances."