BY WALTER ELLIOTT
SOUTH ORANGE / NEWARK – The Township of South Orange Village Planning Board’s next meeting on Dec. 5, if the last two months of public hearings are any indication, will be intensely focused on one particular preliminary and final site application.
That 7:30 p.m. session that Monday at the South Orange Performing Arts Center will continue their hearing on Seton Hall University’s proposal to add to its Richie Regan Recreation and Athletic Center that it started on Oct. 3 and continued on Nov. 7.
SHU and its contracted architect want to add 12,862 square feet to the gymnasium’s southwestern corner plus a 176 sq. ft. vestibule on its north side. The university is asking permission to modify adjacent sidewalks and drive lanes along the building’s southern and eastern sides.
The gym is on SHU’s southernmost part of its 58 acres, abutting the university and South Orange’s border with Newark’s Ivy Hill section and Essex County’s Ivy Hill Park. The park is currently having its baseball/softball diamond and football gridiron, across from the SHU/village border finished in Autumn 2023.
Some of Ivy Hill’s residents next to the school’s border – Reynolds Place, Woodbine Avenue, Synott Place, Midland Avenue and Tuxedo Parkway – want village planners to postpone any vote on the additions until their key demand is met.
Their demand has to do with what they say is increasing flooding incidents flowing downhill and east from SHU property through the park and into their basements.
The residents, who call themselves the Ivy Hill Flood Report, demand that the university, village, city and the county conduct and publish a hydrological and hydraulic analysis of surface and stormwater runoff. The report would give direction to local flood mitigation measures.
Readers who are doing a double take are correct that Ivy Hill is Newark’s tallest part, some 200 feet above sea level. There are also no bodies of water in the area.
While that is true, the residents said they have had more floods – swamping basements by up to five feet, waterlogging cars parked on their streets and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages – in the last 22 years. Plans for the Regan basketball practice center’s extension, while they are still recovering from Hurricane Ida’s Sept. 1-2, 2021 flooding, have brought them out to recent planning board and other meetings.
Aggrieved residents, some of whom have been in Ivy Hill for 40 years, said that some three decades of university construction have decimated natural runoff and absorption areas.
Runoff from SHU’s parking garage and other infrastructure overwhelms a Newark Water and Sewer stormwater catch basin at Woodbine Avenue and Reynolds Place to cause most flooding. It also swamps Ivy Hill Park, turning its walking paths into culverts.
Ivy Hill is not on FEMA’s flood plain maps, making federal recovery funds unavailable.
The flood report group has been putting village planners and other officials’ proverbial feet to the fire, including speaking at the Newark Municipal Council’s Oct. 3 meeting and county officials Oct. 13. West Ward Councilman Dupre` Kelly spoke on their behalf at the Nov. 7 planning board meeting. Mayor Ras Baraka has sent a letter to SHU attorney Erlando Webster, Jr., asking his client to consider making the study.
Several report members and neighbors said that the problem has been at least decades in the making. One resident recalled that a Newark engineer had promised to see whether the city and South Orange had a stormwater sewer interconnection agreement. That was in the aftermath of Hurricane Allison in 2001.
Some of the stormwater and sanitary sewers SHU, Newark and South Orange use may predate the college’s 1850s establishment.
The university, during the hearings, said they would create a retention basin and a parking garage with “a porous surface” as a partial remedy. That and a required environmental review process, however, are contingent on the school getting the center expansion’s approval.
South Orange planners may conclude Dec. 5’s hearing with a vote to either approve or decline SHU’s project.
