Medical Weight Loss in Millburn, NJ

MAPLEWOOD, NJ -- The Millburn High School Boys Lacrosse team kicks off the Essex County tournament this Saturday, May 4 at 4 p.m. as they travel to Columbia High School. According to team member parent David Lipton, "The Millers seek to avenge a tough 8-7 overtime loss to their rival a month earlier. Millburn’s 8-3 record is a sharp improvement from last year’s .500 finish, but it comes as no surprise." He explained that the team returned to most of its starters, including a strong core of seniors who have played together for years with strong bonds both on and off the field.

The team is led by senior captains, Quentin Kuehn (Ursinus commit) and Zach Lipton (RIT commit) and Logan Barr. They are joined by fellow seniors and multi-year varsity letter man Jesse Schwartz, (a middie who paces the team with 25 assists), versatile attack/middie Jake Fishkin, LSM Dylan Wolk, goalie Bobby Hanson and Andrew Zeballos (attack).

Other team leaders include junior Ander Berman, among the state leaders in face-offs wins this season (149) while chipping in 31 points, sophomore Ollie Becker-who leads the team in scoring (28 goals, 42 points) after a brilliant freshman year, and Wade Schmell who has anchored the defense with stand out play all season.

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Rounding out the defense are d-middies led by senior Logan Barr, sophomores Chase Plotkin and Ethan Weinberg.

Other players who have contributed in a big way, include freshman middy Chace Redler (18 points), who makes an impact on both sides of the ball, and freshman defenseman Jagger Zemachson who is among the team leaders in ground balls and forced turnovers.

Another team member's father, Gregg Berman, shared, "Millburn has faced its share of injuries this year. Zach Lipton, the team’s leading scorer for each of the past two seasons, had off-season knee surgery and has had a limited role to start the year. But injuries and line-up changes have created opportunities for more players to contribute, including junior Kiefer Curi and freshmen Quinn Barkley and Timmy Hansen who have added timely goals to Millburn’s attack." He noted that sophomore Wes Dieckman has stepped into a starting role on a defense that has been bolstered by juniors Evan Abraham and Jared Barishaw and sophomores Will Dieterich and Miles Welner.

The players invite everyone to support and cheer on the team this Saturday, May 4, at 4:00 p.m. at Colombia High School.

Hartshorn Elementary School Chess Award Group picture at Tournament Brookdale Community College.Photo Credit: Ying Gu, Cindy Chen, Pooja Batra, Harinder Kau

Hartshorn Elementary School Chess Award, Kindergarten.Photo Credit: Ying Gu, Cindy Chen, Pooja Batra, Harinder Kau

Hartshorn Elementary School Chess Award, 1st grade.Photo Credit: Ying Gu, Cindy Chen, Pooja Batra, Harinder Kau

Hartshorn Elementary School Chess Award, 2nd grade. Photo Credit: Ying Gu, Cindy Chen, Pooja Batra, Harinder Kau

Hartshorn Elementary School Chess Award, 3rd grade.Photo Credit: Ying Gu, Cindy Chen, Pooja Batra, Harinder Kau

Hartshorn Elementary School Chess Award, 4th grade.Photo Credit: Ying Gu, Cindy Chen, Pooja Batra, Harinder Kau

Photo Credit: Ying Gu, Cindy Chen, Pooja Batra, Harinder Kau

Photo Credit: Ying Gu, Cindy Chen, Pooja Batra, Harinder Kau

Hartshorn Elementary School Chess Award Group picture at Millburn High School. Photo Credit: Ying Gu, Cindy Chen, Pooja Batra, Harinder Kau

By Cindy Chen & Ying Gu, Special to TAPinto Millburn-Short Hills

MILLBURN, NJ - Hartshorn Elementary School (K-4) in Millburn/Short Hills achieved historic success at the New Jersey State Chess Federation (NJSCF) Grade School Championships on November 19, 2023.

With over 500 students from grades K-12 participating in the championship event statewide, the achievement of one or two teams receiving a trophy is commendable. However, the remarkable awards of all five grade levels scoring either 1st or 2nd place is unprecedented.

View the championship results here.

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Kindergarten team: 1st place (Arjun, Nathan, Raghav)

1st-grade team: 2nd place (Hannah, Nikhil, Rian)

2nd-grade team: 1st place (Aarav, Christian, Juefei, Rhys, Rishi)

3rd-grade team: 2nd place (Himansh, Josh, Varun, Vincent, William)

4th-grade team: 2nd place (Aarav, Gracelyn, Ivory, Josh, Maahi, Nathan, Sheehan, Vincent)

"I'm exceptionally proud of these students for their hard work and dedication,” praised from Hartshorn Elementary School Principal Ken Frattini, the enthusiastic coach of Hartshorn Chess Club and the founder of Millburn/Short Hills interschool chess league.

"The school and parents have partnered to provide the opportunities and the platform to engage in chess, but the students have taken it upon themselves to excel.” said Principal Frattini, “Master Coach Massey and team organizers, parents Dr. Chen and Ms. Gu, deserve praise as well for their dedication and for providing an enriched environment where the children's minds and thinking are nourished."

New Jersey is building more affordable housing than ever before, but for every home we build, there are still 14 prospective renters who need one. The daunting bottom line: The state faces an estimated shortage of at least 230,000 homes, and the only thing that will change that grim arithmetic is to have all 600 cities and towns operate in good faith and build their quota in accordance with the Mount Laurel Doctrine.

Millburn apparently doesn’t agree, and doesn’t care that 1 out of 4 renters in our state pay more than half their income on housing, most often in poor neighborhoods with bad schools.

The posh township has refused to comply with the law, even as contiguous neighbors in suburban Essex County do their fair share. Towns like Livingston and West Orange have built hundreds of units and have plans for hundreds more, but Millburn has thumbed its nose at its constitutional requirement and dragged its feet through five years of litigation, building a grand total of 38 affordable units from an obligation that dates back to the 1990s.

That’s just a wee bit shy of its obligation to build 1,115, which is why the entire state should applaud Superior Court Judge Cynthia Santomauro, who recently told Millburn that its stalling and exclusionary tactics are no longer tolerable, and left it up to a special master to determine where it must build 75 affordable housing units.

The judge’s decision is the result of action taken by the Fair Share Housing Center, which is responsible for negotiating affordable housing settlements with individual towns. Since 2021, the nonprofit group has been trying to get Millburn to honor its agreement to build housing at a dilapidated DPW site off Main Street, between the business district and a railroad trestle.

But the town’s elected officials announced it would pull out of the project in February, so the judge – after dismissing Millburn’s alternate proposals as “an illusory promise” – dropped the hammer.

Santomauro told Millburn that it can watch the rest of this process from the sidelines, ordered the township to pay legal fees for the Fair Share Housing Center and the project developer, and instructed veteran special master Frank Banisch to also conduct an audit of the town’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund.

“We’re dealing with an exclusionary town,” said FSHC attorney Josh Bauers, who has handled the Millburn case since 2021. “It’s a town that has been zoned a particular way, and they’ve managed to get away without doing very much. It’s a town that needed to be sued to comply, because they felt they could get away with it.”

Nearly 50 years have passed since the New Jersey Supreme Court outlawed exclusionary zoning, which established that New Jersey towns couldn’t zone to keep poor people out by requiring each town to create a “realistic opportunity” to build its share of affordable housing.

Some towns like Millburn -- where the average home price is north of $1 million -- believe they can build walls on their borders under the rubric of “home rule,” which in some cases is a fair argument – at least when it comes to making civic decisions about parks and schools.

But refusing to build affordable housing, as mandated by law, drives up prices for everyone else and keeps low-income families confined to the cities.

Compare this with Saddle River, which has 3,300 residents and a median household income ($228,750) that is more than double the state average.

The opulent Bergen County community has bought into affordable housing with honorable intent and unexpected gusto: It broke ground last week on a 112-unit apartment complex for low- and moderate-income residents, with the mayor and council members all picking up shovels for the media event. And nobody was whingeing about home rule and an invasion of needy neighbors.

There may always be towns that maintain an exclusionary posture and need a legal and financial pummeling to comply with the law. Let Millburn heed a lesson that stings for a while.

The U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey weighed in Monday on a long-standing legal feud between a township in Essex County and an Orthodox Jewish group, stating religious groups must not face legal barriers when establishing new houses of worship.

Chai Center for Living Judaism has filed lawsuits in state and federal courts against the Township of Millburn, alleging they were discriminated against when town officials denied applications to build a synagogue in Millburn.

The federal lawsuit, filed March 31 in U.S. District Court, alleges the township prevented Chai Center from engaging in Orthodox Jewish prayer by thwarting their efforts to build the house of worship on Millburn Avenue.

“Houses of Worship are permitted with conditional use approval,” the township stated in an answer to the federal lawsuit.

Millburn officials did not immediately respond on Tuesday to requests for comment on the U.S. Attorney’s court filing or on the various court actions that have taken place since 2009.

Attorneys for the Maryland law firm that filed the suit were not immediately available to comment.

“The defendants’ actions have prevented plaintiffs from engaging in their religious exercise by building their synagogue, which would allow Chai Center to provide and to expand its religious programming and free it from the onerous conditions under which it now operates out of its rabbi’s home,” the federal lawsuit states.

“The defendants’ actions have prevented plaintiffs from engaging in their religious exercise,” the suit states.

Building a synagogue would allow Chai Center to provide and expand religious programming, the suit says, noting the center currently operates of its rabbi’s home.

The lawsuit alleges parts of the township’s land-use regulations, such as its requirement that houses of worship be located on lots at least 3 acres in size, violates the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.

In response, Millburn filed a motion arguing the RLUIPA claims should be dismissed based on a standard used in state court to review zoning decisions. The motion also argues that the RLUIPA claims are not ready to be heard in federal court because the zoning denial was based on procedural grounds.

RLUIPA is a federal law designed to protect religious institutions from unduly burdensome or discriminatory land use regulations, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Ahead of a decision on the motion, the U.S. Attorney in New Jersey, along with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, filed a statement of interest in the case on Monday.

“RLUIPA is designed to ensure that religious groups of all faiths do not face unjust barriers when seeking to establish places to worship,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a news release.

“Local land use boards cannot unfairly or discriminatorily deny a religious group’s application to use land for religious purposes,” Clarke said. “When local officials use the guise of zoning restrictions to block or restrict religious groups, this not only contravenes our nation’s commitment to religious freedom, it also violates federal law.”

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MILLBURN, NJ -- We have personal concerns related to Assembly Bill 4 (https://legiscan.com/NJ/bill/A4/2024): “reforms on municipal responsibilities concerning the provision of affordable housing.” Please note that although Frank serves as the Deputy Mayor of Millburn Township, the below observations are our own opinions and do not reflect those of the township.

Not Enough Measures Taken to Improve Affordability for Middle-Income Families

There is an affordability crisis in our state – yet, this bill does not take adequate measures to address the growing needs for middle-income families, in particular those families with incomes between 80%-120% of area median income (AMI).

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Why is this a critical oversight? We will use an inclusionary development in our town, The Upton, to illustrate. This 200-unit building, which was agreed to in 2015, has:

As you can see, the “inclusionary” development at The Upton does nothing to increase affordability for middle-income families whose household incomes exceed 80% AMI. Crucially, these middle-income families would not be helped by the current legislation. These families represent our town’s teachers, police officers, firefighters who exceed the limits in place based on the existing affordable housing policy.

Other states such as Massachusetts and California [1, 2, 3, 4] have included policies catering to the needs of middle-income families (80%-120% AMI), and our state should do the same to improve affordability for more families. One potential means of addressing the shortcomings of this bill would be to add another 30% set-aside for middle-income families (80%-120% AMI) as well as the 20% set-aside for low- and moderate-income families (up to 80% AMI) or encouraging 100% middle-income developments.

As an aside, Massachusetts and California consider low income to be 80% AMI, which would be considered moderate income in New Jersey. Similarly, they consider 50% AMI to be very low income, which would be considered low income in New Jersey.

Further Deepening Inequality in Higher-Income Areas

Based on the example above, we can see that even though The Upton is an inclusionary development, it does nothing to lower the median household income in our town, because 15% of the units are restricted to households less than 80% AMI, but 85% of the households are greater than 200% AMI. In fact, it may have served to even push this metric higher.

This observation is particularly problematic when combined with the “income capacity factor” that is being proposed on page 21 of the bill to calculate a municipality’s share of the regional need for affordable housing. If these so-called “inclusionary developments” are actually raising the median income in many towns, then these towns will be allocated an even greater share of future development, which would eventually lead to rampant overdevelopment of these towns.

Indeed, it is not clear what the motivation would be to include an “income capacity factor” – there is nothing in the spirit of the Mount Laurel Doctrine or the Fair Housing Act to suggest that municipalities with higher incomes should be required to shoulder a disproportionate burden of the provision of affordable housing.

More Emphasis Needed on Transformation of Existing Rentals to Affordable

We are pleased to see the possibility of transforming existing market rate units to affordable units on page 51. However, we believe that more details must be necessary as to how this process can be undertaken. Millburn has a vacancy rate of approximately 20% for apartments in town. There are also upwards of 800 apartments constructed prior to Mt. Laurel with market-rate rents close to those suggested by affordability controls. Having a clearly defined process for converting many of these units to be affordable would be an excellent way to provide for affordable housing in an expeditious manner.

Ability to Prioritize Local Workers

On page 23, a proposed “equalized nonresidential valuation factor” is used to determine a municipality’s share of the regional need for the provision of affordable housing. The motivation for this measure seems to stem from the need to provide workforce housing in parts of the state where there is an increased commercial presence. As a corollary to this, we believe that municipalities that have experienced a significant nonresidential valuation increase should have the ability to prioritize the needs of local workers.

Affordability for Seniors

Especially in towns where property tax burdens are high, such as Millburn, we are seeing many residents move out of town even though they desperately would like to stay. There should be additional provisions for determining the precise amount of age-restricted housing necessary in each region of the state and perhaps even a more surgical allocation to individual municipalities based on the proportion of seniors departing.

Additional Protections Needed for Existing Residents

The provision of affordable housing should be incentivized in conjunction with proper planning procedures. The legislation should emphasize the need for proper infrastructure planning (e.g., sewer, impervious coverage, roads, schools) as part of planning for new developments. High-density housing should be kept out of single-family neighborhoods that do not have the infrastructure needed to support high-density living.

On page 45, where there are exclusions to what is considered vacant land, we believe that land that would require high remediation costs should also be excluded. Although currently the legislation excludes “environmentally sensitive lands where development is prohibited by any state or federal agency,” this does not necessarily preclude land where development might not be prohibited, but rather, the cost to remediate it for suitable development may be prohibitive. Indeed, our town is currently facing a potentially $10M clean-up for a proposed town-sponsored 100% affordable housing development.

Additional Guidelines Needed for Best Practices Related to 100% Affordable Developments

In states like California [4], inclusionary development is defined as either:

In contrast, Millburn was asked to sponsor a 75-unit 100% affordable (up to 80% AMI) project using township funding. This does not comport with the values of our community because it does not provision affordable housing in the spirit of inclusivity. Many township residents [5] have spoken out against this project, under the grounds that “segregating people into ‘100% affordable’ projects is harmful for everyone – especially the tenants.”

Millburn is a compassionate, welcoming community, and we believe that it is critical to properly integrate those less fortunate into our town using proper inclusionary development. After all, in order to actualize the goals of Mount Laurel, we must allow all residents of a community to learn from each other so that everyone gets lifted up. The premise for the income-segregated project in Millburn – slated for a contaminated town dump, no less – was the epitome of poor planning. The proposed legislation does nothing to prevent a repeat of this project from happening.

As it stands, the proposed legislation seems to encourage housing projects that have 100% of resident households income restricted to 80% AMI, a practice which is discouraged in other states with affordable housing laws, like California.

It is our hope that our state legislators will take the above into account and amend the proposed legislation to alleviate these concerns and provide an even stronger framework with which to improve affordability in our state.

[1] https://www.masshousing.com/-/media/Files/Developers/Income-Rent-Limits/2023-HUD-Income-Rent-Limits.ashx

[2] https://www.mma.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/MSA-webinar-Affordable-Housing-Overview_DHCD_11.16.22.pdf

[3] https://www.hcd.ca.gov/grants-and-funding/income-limits

[4] https://abag.ca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2022-10/Builders-Remedy-and-Housing-Elements.pdf

[5] https://www.tapinto.net/towns/millburn-slash-short-hills/categories/letters-to-the-editor/articles/another-proud-democrat-for-frank-saccomandi-and-ben-stoller

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