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Yard sale represents heart of Andover
06/3/06 - Posted from the Daily Record newsroom

ANDOVER -- The mayor used to be the borough clerk and worked as a school crossing guard. She once filled in for the borough animal control officer, who was on vacation, when a call came in about a dog that got away from his owner.

Shirlee Bollard, 75, went out on her one and only call as dog catcher. She did not manage to catch the dog.

"He was faster than I was," Bollard said. "He went back home on his own."

Welcome to Andover Borough, basically a small group of homes surrounding a small downtown with a few antique stores along Route 206, a place that one borough official referred to as a forgotten town. Maybe that's because there hasn't been much development in Andover. Eight homes were built about 15 years ago, officials said, and another house went up more recently. That's what used to pass for building booms around here.

So now here comes a big developer from Atlanta, Beazer Homes USA, with plans to put up close to 600 housing units and triple the population of this 660-person borough. The people of Andover have been getting together to try to fight what they see as an invasion. The developer has sued town officials for changing the zoning for the property where the development is planned.

Borough officials have said their annual budget is about a quarter of a million dollars, so they don't have a lot of resources to take on a company that had $5 billion in total revenues last year, according to its financial filings, or about 20,000 times the borough's annual budget. Residents are doing what they know to raise money to hire their own lawyers and environmental consultants. They are gathering old toys from the attic. They are baking cookies.

They are holding a yard sale.

The sale, being held both days this weekend in a parking lot off Route 206 next to the post office, is not the first fundraiser hosted by a residents group called SaveAndover.org. They held a couple of yard sales late last year and apparently raised a little money. Fred DiRenzo, a Rockaway resident who grew up in Andover and helped organize the sale, was not specific about how much was raised. He said something about a few hundred dollars.

That might be enough to purchase about an hour of a lawyer's time.

The people who live and work here say they are worried about traffic, an influx of school-age children, the prospect of starting their own police force (they now are covered by the state police) and property tax increases that they say would drive out many of the borough's working-class residents.

"The old Andover will be forced out because they won't be able to maintain the cost of the new Andover," said DiRenzo.

"We're not rich people," said Nancy Mandeville, 67, who has lived in Andover with her husband, Paul, a lifelong resident, since 1962.

They say they are digging their feet into the ground, trying to protect not only their homes but the rural nature of Sussex County. It is in some ways a little late for that. Trucks rumble along Route 206, the borough's main street, and the county is widening the road south of the borough. Borough residents say traffic is the one thing that has changed here. They say everything else has stayed the same. They say they are still a small town where everything moves at a different pace.

Just look at a sign on the door of one of the antique stores: "Office hours: Open most days about 9 or 10, occasionally as early as 7 but some days as late as 12 or 1." The owner of that particular store, according to his neighbors, hasn't been around for months.

Borough officials do face a problem in their legal battle with Beazer. Their predecessors already approved the development of 590 housing units on the 235 acres of land in question back in 1989. Current officials can't say exactly why, other than it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. The agreement reached with the landowner, a company called Sussex Properties, calls for a developer to build a new borough municipal building and a public swimming pool, complete with a cabana. It calls for a developer to make road improvements, expand the borough water system and build a sewage treatment plant to serve hundreds of existing homes. The developer also would donate a new fire truck.

But when town officials changed the zoning earlier this year, they said some perks not directly related to the project apparently are illegal, based on past court cases. They said that while the agreement requires the developer to build two affordable-housing units to comply with Council On Affordable Housing rules in effect in the 1980s, new rules would require the borough to come up with as many as 80 COAH units. They said the borough would have to build those affordable housing units. They also said the developer missed a deadline to update the council on its plans about a decade ago.

"That is the heart of the case," Richard Cushing, the attorney representing the town in the lawsuit, said of the missed deadline.

Kevin Kelly, an attorney representing Beazer, said borough officials would get the perks from the original deal because they're related to the project's impact, that the borough wouldn't get stuck with the bill from an additional COAH obligation created by the development, and in court papers questioned why borough officials waited almost 10 years to raise the argument of a missed deadline.

Legal issues aside, the heart of the matter is that borough residents want to preserve some semblance of old Andover. The developer's agreement has been in place for 17 years and prospective builders occasionally showed up at council meetings to ask questions, to talk about proposals, but then always went away and weren't heard from again. Beazer showed up a couple of years ago and doesn't seem to be going away. Borough officials changed the zoning of the land in question earlier this year so it no longer included high-density housing, but would allow building homes on two-acre lots.

Bollard had been quoted in a published report asking for help from SaveAndover.org, asking local residents to raise money to help the borough fight the developer's lawsuit. She says she can't comment on that now but added that she said the wrong thing. She has to know it gave the appearance of aligning herself with an anti-development group, of a lack of impartiality. Beazer recently filed an amended lawsuit saying borough officials had been working "surreptitiously with various objector groups ..."

Cushing said it would be legal for the residents' group to donate money to the borough -- but DiRenzo said this past week that the yard sale was about raising money to pay lawyers and engineers to consult with his group.

"We're trying to raise money so that we can be heard," DiRenzo said.

But it seems clear that the zoning change, and combating the lawsuit, has become the borough's first line of defense. It is not clear how the borough is going to pay to fight this battle. Borough residents were saying people in surrounding towns have been thanking them for taking a stand. Their yard sale wasn't simply an empty gesture to raise a little money. They'd have to sell a lot of cookies and old hurricane lamps to make a dent in any legal fees. The yard sale is more about a message about a big corporation being challenged by a small town where everyone lives down the road, where neighbors help one another.

Abbott Koloff can be reached at (973) 989-0652 or akoloff@gannett.com

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