Matrix will be back

The denial last week of an application by the Matrix Development Group to build a 744,000-square-foot warehouse at the corner of Route 130 has created quite a stir.

Residents in the Four Seasons adult community, which abuts the Matrix property, and other warehouse foes were ecstatic (read this post from The Blog of South Brunswick), while others were not so sanguine.

Here is an excerpt from a letter from Paul Murray that ran in today’s Post:

Here is a case of everyone involved coming out losers, except, perhaps, Matrix.

Now Matrix will go to court. Matrix may get everything asked for and maybe even more. The township pays the court costs and the senior community will get stuck with the initial warehouses plans.

It appears to me that a great opportunity to compromise has been lost.

As I wrote earlier in the debate, this was not an easy issue. The Matrix plan essentially conformed — aside from a variance and some waivers — and the developer probably had a sense that it should have been approved without much fuss.

But the question is whether the zoning in place is correct now that the senior housing is in place and whether a planning board has the right to consider community attitudes when judging a plan like this.

Should Matrix sue — its lawyers said they would continue to pursue the project but did not say how — I have a suspicion they might win. Does this mean the Planning Board was wrong to deny the application outright, as Dr. Murray has argued? No. I agree that there will be need for some kind of compromise, but I believe the board should have some discretion to listen to residents, otherwise the board is nothing more than a rubber stamp for development interests.

If the courts side with Matrix on this, it will be because the state’s land-use law is rather archaic and protects property rights above all other considerations. There is a need for revision of the municipal land use law to grant more power to communities to take into account health, safety and quality-of-life issues at the time of an application and not just when the master plan is drafted or a municipality’s zoning code is approved. Too often, the detrimental effects that a development might have on neighboring properties does not become apparent until well after the zoning is in place and it is not enough to say that the master plan will protect us.

While it often does, it also doesn’t in too many cases.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

History lessons

As Ronald Reagan might say, there he goes again.

President George W. Bush has once again shifted rhetorical course in Iraq, finally acknowledging this ugly war’s connections to a past American debacle, but doing so with a selective approach to history that reduces the United States’ 20-year history in Southeast Asia.

Our exit from Vietnam led to defeat and violence, he said, during a speech yesterday at the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

“One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘reeducation camps’ and ‘killing fields,’ ”

This, of course, is an absurd reduction of the historical record, which included nearly a million American soldiers losing their lives in an unwinnable and unpopular civil war that fractured this nation and poisoned our politics for more than a generation.

Matthew Yglesias, blogging for The Atlantic magazine, offers this analysis:

He’d like us to believe, I guess, that the crux of the debate about the Vietnam War was that hawks warned that after the war America’s collaborators in South Vietnam would suffer, whereas doves naively said the Viet Cong were going to offer flowers and sweets.

Back in the real world, though, the essence of the matter was that hawks were warning that the survival of political democracy around the world quite literally depended on South Vietnam staying in non-Communist hands. A Communist victory in Vietnam was said to be destined to lead to the rest of Indochina going Communist, from which the Reds — emboldened — were going to march into Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Our allies in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan would prove incapable of resisting the onrushing tide. With Communism triumphant in Asian, Western Europe would turn to Finlandization to stave off direct Soviet domination, and next thing you know the New World would be crushed beneath the vast economic might of the Old.

It sounds crazy, yes, and the reason it sounds crazy is that it was crazy and when we eventually left Vietnam it turned out that while hawks and doves alike all made some bad forecasts, the hawkish point of view on the big strategic question was completely wrong whereas the dovish view was completely correct.

But this is too nuanced an explanation of history (for a fuller explanation of what happened and what went wrong, I’d suggest reading David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest) and, besides, the president wasn’t interested in a history lesson anyway. The president (or at least his advisors and chief speech writers) was attempting to tap into this poisoned legacy of division with his speech, hoping to marginalize his opponents by reminding Americans of the nation’s loss in that war. That’s been a longstanding GOP tactic — to use U.S. failures in Vietnam to question the patriotism of war opponents and the competency of Democrats on national defense matters.
It’s a cheap shot from a man who has lost all credibility — and one that is likely to backfire, I think, because acknowledging the connections between the two wars can only underscore the futility of our remaining in Iraq. Staying will not lead to stability there, anymore than remaining in Vietnam until the mid-1970s led to stability in Southeast Asia.

More than anything, the speech underscores how deluded this president has become.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

E-mail me by clicking here.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Runner’s diary Wedensday

I’m hoping the weather breaks before the end of the week so I can get outside. I hate running in the damp, rainy fall — wait, it’s still summer.

Anyway, five miles on the treadmill (45:40) listening to Miles Davis’ A Tribute to Jack Johnson.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

E-mail me by clicking here.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.