There is no honor in Millstone town hall anymore. Please allow me to explain.

My perspective is as a property owner, whose family roots in the community date back more than 150 years. As such, I have a stake in the township and I am fully committed to insuring the quality of life for generations to come. And, I am very troubled by what I see.

Last year, an enormous amount of time, effort and money was spent on a new master plan, designed to protect the community from overdevelopment. I agree fully with that concept. As was appropriate, there were public meetings, debates and discussions. And, sometimes, difficult choices were made. Ultimately, many of those choices impacted property rights and the future land values of many small landowners like myself. In order to fairly lessen the negative impact on landowners, sensible exceptions were carved out of the new plan.

For example, these grandfathered exceptions allowed those that had pre-existing building approvals to protect those approvals which, after all, were perfectly legal and in many instances quite costly to obtain. These exceptions were not for huge developers, but for folks like me who may have plans to build a home for a family member or for ourselves on a few acres of the property that we already own.

Concerned, I personally spoke to members of the Planning Board and the Township Committee, in public and on the record, and they assured me time and again that these exceptions would not be violated and that my rights, yes, my rights as a property-owning, taxpaying American would be protected.

Fast forward to the last couple of weeks as the Township Committee has quietly rammed through a new ordinance that creates what they now call “design criteria changes,” which has the net effect of making those grandfathered approvals null and void by essentially forcing all those who were exempted to seek variances in order to comply with these new “design criteria changes.”

Can you imagine what hoops we will have to jump through to get those approvals? It will never happen. And, those property owners who are affected will certainly lose hundreds of thousands of dollars of real value and will have lost all the many thousands of dollars they already invested for approvals that will now be rendered useless.

For most property owners, the crisis is not yet real. They believe their government, a Republican government, after all, will protect their property rights and their assets. Sadly, their wake-up call will come when they try to utilize the property rights they think they have, unless somehow we wake up the dishonorable people who claim to serve our interests on the Millstone Township Committee and tell them this is America.

James McCaffery

Millstone