This Application Cannot Be Approved, by Statute

The Municipal Land Use Law (N.J.S.A. 40:55D-1 et seq.) — the statute governing how municipalities like Hopewell Borough evaluate site plan applications such as the pending Hopewell 57 proposal — does not treat public participation as a courtesy. It treats participation as a fundamental right. Under N.J.S.A. 40:55D-10(d), the testimony of every witness on an application for development must be taken under oath, and the right of cross-examination must be permitted to all interested parties. Under N.J.S.A. 40:55D-10(f), documents and exhibits presented to the Board become part of the record and must be available for public inspection at all reasonable times before the hearing. These are not technicalities. They are the mechanisms by which a community participates in decisions that will shape it for decades.

In the Hopewell 57 proceeding, those requirements have not been honored.

The Hopewell Borough Planning Board has scheduled deliberation on the Hopewell 57 site plan application for June 10, 2026. Evidentiary documents provided by the applicant, including revised engineering drawings, a Stormwater Management Report, an Environmental Report, and an Engineering Report, were not properly entered into the record at the hearings or made known to the public in advance, despite repeatedly being asked for and promised. As a result, the public — the concerned Borough residents who will live with the consequences of this development — has been denied the procedural rights New Jersey's Municipal Land Use Law guarantees us: the right to review the evidence, the right to cross-examine the experts whose work informs the Board's decision, and the right to respond. The Board cannot lawfully proceed to close public comment and deliberate on a record assembled this way.

This is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of law.

The Borough's own engineering consultant identified twenty-five unresolved deficiencies in the applicant's stormwater design, including errors in the basic rainfall calculations, a flood hazard area that may flow back into the project's own stormwater facilities, missing storm sewer conveyance calculations, and an unanswered question about whether the developer has even applied for required state environmental permits.

The public has not heard the Borough engineer testify to those findings. The applicant has not been required to substantively respond to them on the record. We, the residents of this Borough, the parties whose homes and streets and water tables are at stake, have not been afforded the opportunity to cross-examine either witness on the substance of these deficiencies. And yet public comment has been closed, and the Board is scheduled to deliberate.

This is not a small procedural irregularity. It is a denial of statutory rights to the very community the Municipal Land Use Law was written to protect.

The remedy is not novel; it is simply the procedure New Jersey law already requires. The Planning Board must reopen the hearings. The Borough engineer must testify to her stormwater deficiency findings on the record. The applicant must respond, on the record, to those twenty-five deficiencies. The public, represented by our own retained experts and by residents directly, must be permitted to cross-examine both witnesses on the substance of what they say. Only then is the record complete enough for the Board to make the findings of conformance the statute requires before any approval can be contemplated.

A vote on June 10, before those steps occur, is a vote taken on an application the public has never been allowed to fully examine and challenge — exactly what N.J.S.A. 40:55D-10(d) was written to prevent.

Furthermore, approval with conditions does not solve this problem. Conditional approval is appropriate when a design is fundamentally sound and incidental items remain. It is not appropriate when twenty-five engineering deficiencies remain unresolved, when the Borough's own expert has not testified, and when the public has been denied the opportunity for cross-examination of the applicant and the planning board's engineer, guaranteed by the statute. A planning board cannot delegate its substantive review duty to a downstream construction official or zoning officer, and it cannot abrogate the public's procedural rights by closing comment before those rights have been exercised.

The path forward is straightforward. The remedy of this oversight is clear. The Board must defer the vote, reopen the hearing, and afford the public the procedural rights New Jersey law requires. Or the Board may deny the application as currently presented: incomplete and insufficient to merit approval.

What the Board cannot lawfully do, on June 10, is close comment and deliberate on an application the public has been denied the right to fully review and challenge.

This community is owed the due process the statute promises us. We insist on it.