Near the peak of the mountain stands the king of the mountain, Pat Wallace. One sunny morning, the lanky developer hikes out to the cleared acre of land that someday will hold his dream house, with its staggering views of the New Jersey Highlands.
Near the bottom of the mountain, in the first houses built in Wallace's 37-lot luxury development in Ringwood called Kensington Wood, some homeowners chronicle a series of housing fiascoes along the steep, rocky landscape.
One septic field oozed liquid waste onto a driveway, another encroached on a wetlands stream -- at a cost of $70,000 to homeowners. A third neighbor jokes uneasily about the waterfall that gushes across her front yard in heavy rains. "I'm the only person who can whitewater-raft to Grand Union from my very own driveway," says Deborah Atamanchuk.
These homeowners live day to day with the latest wrinkle in North Jersey sprawl -- development on steep mountains and hillsides that are often environmentally sensitive and almost always a challenge to build upon.
No state law guides such development. Local regulations are a welter of conflicting rules and limits, which compel opposing forces to battle it out town by town, project by project. Currently arousing citizen ire are projects in West Milford (288 units on a steep mountainside), Oakland (313 units on a rocky slope along Long Hill Road), Bloomingdale (360 houses on a wooded mountain named Federal Hill), and Hawthorne (128 units on steep slopes).
Yet the consequences can be extreme. Beyond sullying some of the state's most gorgeous lands and waters, development on steep hillsides has caused erosion, flooding, failed septic systems, and mudslides severe enough to sweep away yards and decks.
Nonetheless, after a protracted land-use fight, Wallace has come out on top. He has won even in the face of opposition from the courts, from voters, from town engineers, and from the State Development and Redevelopment Plan, which is intended to control growth in areas the state designates as environmentally sensitive.
And Ringwood is such an area, in part because it is home to the Wanaque Reservoir, the state's largest water supply, which provides drinking water to 2.5 million people in North Jersey.
In the end, it was a change in a zoning ordinance, introduced by a friend, that gave Wallace what he needed to build.
"It should've been called the Pat Wallace Zoning Relief Ordinance," says Tim Tuttle, a Ringwood resident and Planning Board member at the time the ordinance passed.
"This was one of the quickest changes I've ever seen in a zoning ordinance, and the primary beneficiary was Mr. Wallace. This was certainly not in the interests of Ringwood. It smacked of politics rather than planning."
"What you have in land use is a state of affairs where the public really plays no role," says Susan Gyarmati, a Ringwood environmentalist and a longtime watchdog of the town's government. "People may come and scream at hearings, but most of the time they're totally ignored."
With developers able to push through projects against even vehement outcry, pressure is mounting for statewide protections.
Patrick O'Keefe, head of the New Jersey Builders Association, says he would back a statewide regulation if it were modeled on the state law that has protected wetlands since 1987.
"It's such a hodgepodge of standards," O'Keefe says of steep-slope ordinances. "We have a great love of 'home rule' in New Jersey. We just don't seem to have a great love of homes for people in New Jersey."
For his part, Wallace remains an unabashed critic of environmentalism. "We used to call them swamps, and now we call them wetlands and worship them and the bugs they create," he says. "We worship rocks and steep slopes. I call it the new paganism."
As evidence of the perceived hypocrisy of environmentalists, he drives by the homes of two of his foes, situated in relatively close proximity on sloping lots in Ringwood. He calls the owners "communists" and challenges them "to put their money where their mouth is."
He scoffs at the disastrous predictions his opponents made for his development: "All the drainage problems I was going to have, the world was going to come to an end, we'd run out of food, the sky was falling."
Kensington Wood, whose house prices average $650,000, now brings about $500,000 a year to the town's tax coffers. Just three of the 37 home sites remain unsold.
"If I didn't have an attractive package here, I wouldn't be able to sell it," Wallace says, and homeowners concede that they love their views, custom homes, and friendly neighbors.
Kensington Wood is the first development built in mountainous Ringwood since the town passed new steep-slope regulations in 1996. For years, Wallace had pushed to build at greater densities on the pristine mountainside than the town allowed.
He first dreamed of putting 280 townhouses on the mountain. That application was denied, and more failure greeted his dogged efforts to develop the property, through rezoning applications, low-income housing lawsuits, and more rezoning requests.
In 1985, a report by Borough Engineer Ed Haack had said town regulations would allow 18 to 20 homes on the site. Wallace proposed twice as many. Haack was critical.
"I don't want septics for 42 lots on this tract," Haack said in minutes of a July 1994 Planning Board meeting. He warned of septic and drainage problems with that many houses on 67 acres.
Finally, in a 1994 referendum, Ringwood voted more than 3-to-1 against extending its sewer system, which scuttled Wallace's application for Kensington Wood. "The people have spoken," Wallace acknowledged then.
Two years later, Wallace friend and then borough Councilman Scott Heck, who was the council's liaison to the Planning Board, introduced an amendment that relaxed the town's ordinance on steep slopes. Opponents called it a brand new ordinance dressed up as an amendment to cloak its controversial new allowances.
The amendment, although highly technical, closely resembled suggestions made in a 1988 letter to the borough engineer from Gregory Czura, then Wallace's business partner. According to the Czura formula, the number of houses allowed on Wallace's 67 acres would double from the engineer's recommendation of 18 to 20.
The Heck amendment also doubled the number of homes Wallace could build. It passed a few days before Christmas 1996, three weeks after it had been introduced.
Recent repeated telephone messages to Heck requesting comment about the amendment and the benefits to Wallace went unanswered.
Wallace denies receiving any special treatment from close friends. "I wish I could say that was true," Wallace says. "I live in a glass house and get held to a much higher standard. Do I know them? I do. We're all Republicans. Do I receive benefits? I'd say no."
The longtime Ringwood resident also defends the Czura letter as one among many suggested ordinances solicited by the borough in 1988. Referring to the letter and, by extension, himself, Wallace adds: "Why not take some input from someone who's worked with the land successfully? I can do a development and leave the trees and make it look great. Why not take my opinions under advisement?"
He says the original slope ordinance, passed in 1982, was designed by environmentalists, while the 1996 version "was modified and shaped by the Planning Board based on all kinds of input, one of which was my former partner."
To some, Wallace's 15-year push to build Kensington Wood is exemplified by a building that has earned, due to scale and scenic domination, the derisive nickname of "The Ugliest House in Ringwood." Others just refer to the $800,000 wood contemporary, built on an almost vertical slope near the top of Kensington Wood and visible from many points in town, as "The House."
Local Democrats have featured its photograph in campaign literature, labeling it "an unmistakable sign of suburban sprawl." Others identify it as a turning point, the structure that turned Ringwood residents against development.
For Wallace, such comments show the unethical lengths to which environmentalists will go to make a point. "I think it looks fine," Wallace says. The owner "is very upset that they're using his house as a political football, to the point where his kids have been tormented at school."
But even fellow developers wonder aloud whether the town changed its zoning to accommodate a single developer's project; environmentalists join in the accusations.
"It's an incredible story of how towns accommodate their favorite developers," says Joanne Atlas, a member of Skylands Citizens for the Land, Environment and Neighborhoods, an environmental group working in the Highlands.
Skylands CLEAN sued Ringwood unsuccessfully for relaxing its steep-slope ordinance.
Atlas notes that when Ringwood installed a new water system in 1998, Kensington Wood was the first area to be serviced.
Tuttle, the former Planning Board member, who also served on the Mahwah Planning Board, says Ringwood acted in a manner out of step with the state.
"When you compare the guidelines out of Trenton that say 'protect the Highlands' with this kind of zoning relief, you have to wonder," Tuttle says. "Ringwood just said the hell with it. They downzoned a conservation area. We're not independent of the state of New Jersey."
Similarly, some residents at Kensington Wood, which is managed by Wallace and some family members who live there, speculate that a relationship between Wallace and the town has kept their grievances from being heard. They wonder how septic fields passed inspection and why drainage problems, when addressed to the town engineer in registered letters, went unanswered.
"The Wallaces told us that's the town's responsibility," says Steve Atamanchuk, who surveys the erosion in his back yard. "We go to the town and they say no, no, that's the Wallaces' responsibility as long as he's building houses up there.
"They're playing pingpong here. One hits it to the other and nothing gets done. The people who invested money here, they're getting taken for a ride."
Copyright © 2002 North Jersey Media Group Inc.