affordable housing is increasingly becoming scarce in New Jersey and today Senate lawmakers met to work on a new version of a bill that'll tackle the crisis the legislation stalled during the lame duck session but has more backers this time around and proposes a major overhaul in how the state meets its affordable housing obligation but as Joanna Gagis reports the bill will likely go through even more changes before landing on the governor's desk well we're still roughly 200,000 or so units short on the needed number of affordable apartments in our state the Senate Urban and Community Affairs committee got back to work today on a package of bills that address the need for more affordable housing in New Jersey our efforts here today will codify years of legal precedence and ensure New Jersey's affordable housing system is insulated from changes in leadership or effort to undermine Equitable access the most controversial bill s50 would abolish the now defunct COA the Council on affordable housing that was created in 1985 in response to the Supreme Court's Mount Laurel decision requiring each municipality to ensure a certain percentage of their housing options are affordable COA has overseen those Municipal plans but this bill moves its oversight to the Department of Community Affairs and that has mixed reviews what we need to remember is that COA was you know succumbed greatly daily for years to political pressure and that kind of negates the kind of you know umpire aspect that I think we hope to see from a state level mechanism that determines you know a Town's obligation we are glad to see this legislation move forward today because we think this is the best way we have seen to make sure that everybody who wants to live in a community has the ability to do that COA is the solution not the problem the one brilliant thing about the the Fair Housing Act is originally designed was it evenly balanced those that that um bore the responsibility municipalities and those that wanted affordable housing what's missing from this bill is where is the balanced body since COA began there have been three rounds of affordable housing mandates once every 10 years a number of factors are considered including recent census data indicating how many people have moved into a region but as the deadline approaches to begin round four development many towns are still working to complete round three you have 345 towns that settled much of the development from those approvals is going to take place in this round no one's accounted for that some of the greatest opposition was around the need for more data to understand how many units municipalities have already built before this next round of affordable housing obligations are doled out what's the fair share number we did our best to to to estimate it but we understand that maybe the assembly has that information I don't know if you have it if anybody has what has actually been built in each region how many units have been built under the bill DCA would have to publish a report on the regional need as well as each municipality's obligations some towns say their specific needs or challenges aren't being considered and then they'll face fines when they can't comply this amount of development will will impact our schools our infrastructure and our environment which doesn't even touch on the issue of lack of sewer capacity using inclusionary housing as the primary mechanism forces municipalities to build large market rate projects in exchange for a handful of affordable units in New Jersey unlike in other states we cannot require developers to pay for many of the infrastructure impacts of their developments including on our schools in police and fire departments because of this the law forces taxpayers to subsidize for-profit developers without necessarily netting a lot of affordable units the bill did move out of committee along party lines with committee chair Troy singleton saying that more work will be done on the bill before it reaches the governor's desk in Trenton I'm Joanna Gagis NJ Spotlight [Music] news