Dear Editor:
Open Letter to Councilman McGrath
Cannot understand your justification for voting for the 30-year PILOT deals for the warehouses, using PFOS chemical water pollution of our wells. You promote the notion that local taxpayers will be made responsible somehow for industrial polluters and that Parsippany citizens have to face this possible reality.
How exactly does this fit into the PILOTs, will this reduced tax revenue help even if local citizens somehow were subjected to burden the costs of PFOS contamination of our aquifer? Why is your lack of faith in the higher powers of Federal or State sources to remedy this so strong, is that that the purpose of government as intended or the means proper?
When you admitted you did not know enough about the PILOTs rather than vote No, you abstained, allowing the vote to succeed. These PILOTs all initiated by John Inglesino have now divided the town into divisions that can not and will not be remedies by an audit of the BOE, the numbers you say that are “all over the place” seem to be mere estimations of projected children that will live in these so-called affordable units. PILOTs and especially for places like Parsippany only help justify a upside-down and regressive tax system that corporate power has subjected the working class to in this country.
Strange how the warehouse approved for Lanidex 20-30 and in an inappropriate location according to the warehouse guidelines themselves, needs not a PILOT, when it requires major modifications to the present site? The truth is that Lanidex 20-30 would be more suitable for affordable housing. A scorched earth policy of inappropriate development will not change the obligations of the Housing Mandates. The only logical answer is making housing more affordable overall. The only result of this would be slower profits for corporate real estate owners in their usury extraction of fees, and rents, for living space. Housing should be a passive right of citizenship, not a free market enterprise. The Housing Market is totally alienated from the reality of our austerity economy and the working people’s wages and costs of living.
Nicholas Robert Homyak
