Township Council endorses 2025 housing element despite questions about final report and projected sites

The Township of Washington Council voted to endorse the municipality's 2025 Housing Element and Fair Share Plan on June 23, but several council members said they had not received the final planning-board report and asked for more detail on the locations and unit counts that underlie the plan.

Councilmembers pressed planning staff and legal counsel during a lengthy discussion before the roll call. Council members said corrections that the planning board approved were not clearly circulated, and they raised specific concerns about a reference to a development called Stone Mill that the report had noted as developed when it is not.

Why it matters: endorsement of the housing element sets the township's framework for how it plans to meet state-mandated affordable-housing obligations and influences where future applications and developers may locate projects within the township.

Most of the discussion centered on the buildable-unit calculations presented to the planning board and on two sites cited in the final report. According to testimony summarized at the meeting, the Department of Community Affairs (DCA) assigned the township an obligation of 184 units; the local planning consultant's realistic development potential (RDP) calculation for the current cycle was described in the meeting as 11 units (the consultant reportedly changed an earlier figure of eight to 11). The consultant also identified a site at 370 Pascack Road that the final report describes as a 72-unit proposal; that site was listed in the plan as a second site with 17 total units, of which 15 would be affordable housing units, producing a plan total the consultant summarized as 21 affordable units under the plan.

Council members noted competing ways to total obligations. The meeting transcript records that the consultant's method for calculating —unmet need— applies an additional factor (described at the meeting as 25 percent of the RDP), which would add roughly three units and would produce about 14 total affordable units required for the cycle under that interpretation. Council members said there is debate over which calculation method is appropriate and asked staff to confirm how the numbers were derived.

Several council members said they had not received the final, corrected report electronically; one member said they had only received a single hard copy in a binder. Township Administrator Mark DiCarlo and Township Attorney Shivan Bailey were asked to confirm whether the planning-board corrections had been incorporated; Bailey and staff said corrections were made and that a sketch of the 370 Pascack Road proposal appears at page 39 of the plan, but council members said they had not been provided the development application or other supporting materials for that site and asked to be notified when such material is filed.

Despite the concerns and requests for clarification, the council moved to endorse the housing element and fair share plan (Resolution 25-257) and approved it by roll call vote. The roll call recorded affirmative votes from Councilmembers Casio (Gascio in some transcript lines), Sears, Oman (Ullman in some lines), Velez, and the council president.

What was not decided: council members requested staff follow-up to circulate the final report and any corrections, to identify precisely which sites the plan counts as satisfying the RDP, and to provide copies of any pending development applications (including material for the 370 Pascack Road sketch) to the governing body before further related approvals. Several council members asked staff to confirm the methodology behind the unmet-need calculation and to note where the planning board made edits.

Next steps: staff said the planning-board report would be made available and that any forthcoming development applications would appear before the planning board and council as required. Councilmembers asked for written confirmation of the corrections and for an electronic copy of the final report prior to the council's next meeting on July 14, 2025.