Dear Editor:
I attended the September 9 Parsippany town council meeting to ask the council to eventually vote no on items that appear on the September 9 agenda, which are leading up to giving the developers of PARQ a PILOT for the hundreds of apartments they plan to build on their property. I am in favor of building these apartments. My problem is the not-so-secret, secret plan to give the developer a PILOT for this. The school district will suffer a huge tax loss, and many school-age children will live there.
This story is disturbing. The Parsippany Focus ran an article on June 9, 2025, stating that the PARQ developer had hired John Inglesino as their new attorney because he could get them a PILOT. It is well established that he is the key to getting a real estate PILOT in Parsippany.
This PILOT is not in place yet, but the redevelopment plan ordinance 2025:18, which names the block and lot numbers for the PARQ development, and another item on the consent agenda of this meeting that the council will eventually be voting on, are steps toward giving the PARQ development a PILOT. Let’s face it, this developer already had permission to build apartments, so what else is new here that requires “redevelopment” approval? The answer is a PILOT.
Furthermore, this PARQ apartment development is already in the Parsippany “Housing Element and Fair Share plan” that can be found online and 20% of these apartments will be affordable housing. The state’s cutoff for making changes to this plan was August 31. This means that this developer has opted into the town’s plan and has given up its right to sue for a builder’s remedy that the mayor likes to threaten will lead to a builder building a slum or worse. Of course, they wouldn’t do that anyway, as it would make the rest of their grand plan look shoddy.
The final issue that is very disturbing concerns the political contributions that they made to the Mayor’s reelection campaign. In October 2024, the owner of PARQ, Tema Development Inc., made a maximum allowed contribution of $5200 to the Mayor. A day later, an executive who is tied to the PARQ project also made another maximum allowable contribution of $5200 to the mayor. That’s $10,400 given to the mayor’s campaign, a coincidence? Meanwhile, the Inglisino law firm contributed about $20,000 to the mayor’s campaign through June 30. Although none of this is illegal, it should be concerning to the people of Parsippany.
I asked the council to consider this as they vote on upcoming PARQ-related ordinances. The council members did not respond, but Mayor Barberio did in his general remarks a few minutes later. He went off on a tirade about politics and picking on Inglesino without ever addressing the facts I laid out. What is he doing?
Bernie Clarkin
