Your questions. With the documents attached.

A clear no. Not "we'll study it," not "it depends on the applicant." A data center is the wrong use for this township: it consumes an enormous amount of power and water, it generates constant mechanical noise, it puts almost nothing back into the local economy in jobs, and once it is built it is there for thirty years.

I'll also say plainly where that answer comes from. I work with large-scale computing infrastructure for a living. I know what these buildings need from a grid and from a water supply, and I know how the siting conversation tends to go. That is exactly why I don't want one here.

And we have already watched this film once. Think back to the crematorium. By the time most residents found out, the process was well along, and the pushback had to be organised in a hurry against a clock that someone else had set. The lesson of the crematorium was never really about crematoriums. It was about notice, about residents learning what is proposed early enough to have a say that still matters. If we repeat that process for something with the footprint of a data center, we will have learned nothing.

Ordinance 2026-21 is a step, and it deserves to be called that. What it actually does is delete five permitted-use lines from three zoning districts, two in the MU-ARCD district, two in the Office Commercial district, and one in the Planned Commercial Development district, the last of which read "research and development uses, including, but not limited to, computer centers and data processing facilities." 1

Two things about it are worth knowing before anyone calls the matter settled.

First, four of those five deletions are not data-center lines at all. They are references to Standard Industrial Classification Major Group 737, Computer Programming and Data Processing Services. SIC 737 is the code for software firms, IT consultancies, service bureaus and data-entry offices. 2 A corporate support or service center, the kind of employer that fills an office building with people who eat lunch in town, sits squarely inside that code. We should not be closing the door on office employers while we aim at warehouses full of servers. The language needs to name the use by what it does: floor area given to computing equipment, megawatts of connected electrical load, water consumption, employees per thousand square feet. That is how you write a definition that catches the thing you meant and nothing else.

Second, and more important: a zoning amendment cannot bind a redevelopment plan. Under New Jersey law, a redevelopment plan "shall supersede applicable provisions of the development regulations of the municipality." 3 If a parcel is placed in a redevelopment area, the plan adopted for it governs, and whatever the zoning ordinance says about permitted uses goes to the back of the line. So the honest answer to "are we protected?" is: against an ordinary zoning application, somewhat better than we were. Against the route these projects actually arrive by, the ordinance is not the thing that stops it. A standing policy against the use, applied at the redevelopment-plan stage, is.

No. Robbinsville can grow. The question I keep asking is a different one: does the growth pay for what it brings with it?

Every new building arrives with a set of costs attached, roads, intersections, sewer capacity, classroom seats, emergency calls. Those costs land on the township whether or not anyone negotiated for them. So when a project comes forward, the test is simple: over the life of the agreement, does what the township collects cover what the township takes on? That is an arithmetic question, and it has an answer. We have the arithmetic for the agreements we were able to obtain, and you can run it yourself.

A long-term tax exemption under N.J.S.A. 40A:20, most people call it a PILOT , replaces a property's ordinary tax bill with a negotiated "Annual Service Charge," usually a percentage of the property's gross revenue, for a fixed term. 4

The part that matters for your bill is the part nobody puts on a flyer. An ordinary property tax bill is split among the township, the county and the school district. An Annual Service Charge is not. It goes to the municipality, less a small administrative share. So for the length of the agreement, the schools and the county are largely outside the arrangement, while the children who live in the building still show up at the schoolhouse door.

I am not against these agreements on principle. They are a legitimate tool, and sometimes the right one. I am against signing them without publishing the arithmetic first.

I requested the agreements under the Open Public Records Act and worked through them line by line. The short version: the terms vary a great deal, and not in a direction that is easy to explain.

Two agreements signed in 2012 and 2013 set the service charge at 10% of gross revenue over twenty years. A 2018 agreement with the same developer set it at 15% over eleven years. Other agreements run thirty years. Several carry a per-square-foot floor in a "Schedule A" that the township did not produce, so part of the picture is still missing, and I say so on the page rather than filling the gap with a guess.

All of it is laid out, agreement by agreement, with the schedules and the sources: the development agreements, a side-by-side comparison, and You Run The NUMBERS if you want to change the assumptions and see what happens.

The requirement itself is not in doubt. The Land Use Code says sidewalks "shall be required on both sides of all local streets in all zones." 5

But a board can waive that requirement. When it does, the developer pays the township "an amount equal to the reasonable cost of installing said sidewalks," as determined by the Township Engineer, and the money goes into a dedicated Sidewalk Capital Construction Fund to be spent on sidewalks elsewhere "where properly authorized by the Mayor and Council." 6

That rule is only seven years old, and it was an improvement. Before June 2019 a board could grant the same waiver for a filing fee, and the developer owed nothing toward a sidewalk anywhere. Ordinance 2019-15 created the payment obligation for the first time. Credit where it is due.

What was never built around it is the control structure. One professional sets the amount; there is no requirement for a second estimate, no public register of waivers granted, and no annual report on what came into the fund or what went out of it. I obtained the ledger under OPRA and reconciled it: $129,514.44 in, $76,652.56 out, $52,861.88 remaining. 7 The arithmetic is clean. The process around it is what needs writing down.

Compare it to the way the township handles a sidewalk that does get built. There, under a different section of the same chapter, the township holds a performance guarantee at 120% of the Engineer's estimate and does not release it until he certifies the work, with a maintenance guarantee running two years after that. 8 In 2020 the township drew on exactly that kind of guarantee in one subdivision to correct ten manholes. One mechanism has teeth. The other asks us to take it on faith.

Three things I would put in writing: every waiver recorded in a public register with the estimate attached; two independent estimates before the amount is set; and an annual public report of the fund, what came in, what went out, which sidewalk it built.

Right now the law sets the floor: a meeting agenda has to be public 48 hours ahead, to the extent the items are known. 9 Forty-eight hours is a floor, not a standard. Nobody reads a Friday agenda about a Monday vote and organises a response.

What I would push for is simple and unglamorous: the backup material posted with the agenda, not just the title of the item. A plain-English summary at the top of anything with a tax or land-use consequence. And for the big ones, a redevelopment plan, a long-term tax agreement, a zoning change, a public explanation before the vote that says what it costs, what it earns, and who it affects.

I'll make a commitment I can actually keep regardless of how the election goes: when I look into something, I publish what I find, including the parts that cut against me. Every page on this site has its sources attached and a line at the bottom inviting you to tell us if we got something wrong. That is not a campaign tactic. It is the job.

I want to answer this carefully, because the easy version of the answer is a cheap shot and I'd rather give you a test you can apply to anyone, me included.

Here it is: name one thing you read closely enough to change before it passed. Not attended. Not supported. Changed.

That is the whole job of a council member on a technical vote. Somebody drafted the document. Somebody else will live with it for thirty years. The person in between is supposed to read it and find the thing that is wrong before it becomes permanent. If I serve and you ask me that question in a year, I want to be able to point at a sentence and say: that one. I changed that.

One hundred percent of the council salary, for as long as I serve, to Robbinsville school sports, clubs and enrichment programs. Not a share of it. All of it.

It is a small amount of money against a municipal budget and I won't pretend otherwise. It is not a policy. It's a statement about why I'm running, and it is the one promise on this page that is entirely within my own control to keep.