Council Caucus: June 7, 2021
PERTH AMBOY – We have lost an incredible number of buildings of historical or architectural interest over the last few decades, and we are getting to a tipping point, where if we don’t do something to change the direction of what is happening, we won’t have much left to save.
The HPC had an inventory of the city’s landmarks done in 2016, and it compared the number of landmarks in Perth Amboy with the inventory done before that in 1978. This is what the 2016 inventory found:
•51 of the buildings surveyed in 1978—and considered of historical or architectural value—were demolished between then and 2016. More have been torn down since then.
•95 buildings surveyed in 1978 were so unwisely altered between then and the 2016 survey, that they were no longer worthy of being part of the city’s inventory.
There are many reasons that we find ourselves in this position, but these are two of the major reasons:
•We have had administrations in the past that have been very comfortable ignoring what little safeguards we do have when those safeguards interfered with something they wanted to do.
(One of the best examples of that is when the previous administration actually supported the demolition of a building at the Copper Works site that was on the New Jersey Register of Historic Places—for parking lot spaces.)
•But the biggest reason is that we have a historic preservation ordinance that is vague and incomplete, which makes it very easy to avoid HPC review.
What’s the problem with the ordinance?
The historic preservation ordinance is Section 258 of the City Code. In general, it states that any application to the planning board or the zoning board or any permits out of code enforcement that apply to historic sites or districts, shall be referred to the HPC for review.
BUT the ordinance doesn’t define what a historic site is, and it doesn’t list any buildings in Perth Amboy that are historic sites. In towns where historic preservation works and is taken seriously, that’s not the case. The buildings to be protected are listed. The ordinance lays out criteria for designating something a historic site. The ordinance spells out the procedure and gives standards for review—and on and on.
Perth Amboy’s ordinance does none of that. To compare those ordinances with Perth Amboy’s is like night and day. The HPC wants to hire someone with an expertise in land use law and historic preservation to review our ordinance and suggest where we need to change it in order to make it work properly and start having these proposed changes to city landmarks actually go before the HPC for review.
Other plans of the HPC described at the meeting include:
•Maximizing National Register nominations, not just because National Register sites are destinations for heritage tourists, but because income producing buildings in National Register districts are eligible for historic preservation tax credits. They get a reduction in taxes equal to a certain percentage of what they spend on rehabilitating their properties.
•There is a 20% federal tax credit
•There is up to a 40% tax credit on the state level
When Governor Murphy signed the NJ law in January and created the Historic Preservation Tax Credit, he said that it is targeted to old, urban building stock, to encourage revitalization and investment in these older urban areas. These buildings are already in historic districts in some towns. Here in Perth Amboy, we may have an opportunity to get some of our older, deteriorating buildings into National or New Jersey Register Districts and take advantage of those tax credits to encourage building owners to spruce up their buildings, or to encourage developers to take on a project in an older, urban area, like our downtown.
There is no guarantee that we will get the National Register designation, but we would like to try to do that.
•The need to hire experts or consultants for HPC reviews. The HPC is one of the city’s land use boards. There are four: planning, zoning, redevelopment, and historic preservation. We don’t think of the HPC as a land use board, because in Perth Amboy it has never functioned that way—which is why we have lost so many landmarks. But if it functions properly, it reviews applications the same way the planning board does, for example. The only difference is, it only reviews application for historic sites or landmarks.
Every land use board in the city has experts or professionals that review their applications—an attorney, an engineer, a building or fire code expert, and so on. They make their comments and recommendation to the members of the board, who take that into account when they make their decisions. Like the other land use board, the HPC does not have that expertise on the board itself, and needs to hire it. It needs specialists like restoration architects, architectural historians, perhaps an attorney. So money is needed to hire that expertise, but the HPC doesn’t have that in what it has been allocated.
•Money for grant matches. The HPC has a tiny budget, so it can’t do big things. It needs grants for that, and most of the grants available require a 20-25% match. So money is needed for the grant matches, and again, there isn’t a lot of money in what the HPC has been allocated for that.
Bottom line, the HPC has been allocated a very tiny budget, and it’s not adequate to do most of what it wanted to do this year. There was an appeal to take all of this into account during next year’s budget, and possibly allocate the HPC more of the funds that it needs.
At that point, Council President Petrick asked if it would be possible to find a few more dollars for the HPC out of this year’s budget. It’s not clear if that will happen, but the other members of the city council seemed amenable to having a look to see if that’s possible before Wednesday’s meeting. BA Ed Remsen was very supportive of the idea, stating that the allocation for the HPC was too small.
It was also stated that the revision of the historic preservation ordinance is the top priority for the HPC, and that has to go along with a revision of the Historic Preservation Element of the Master Plan.
