חרדים און לעיקוואד צושטערן א סטעדיום

Multiple factors doomed arena

Funding, Orthodox opposition hurt
Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 01/12/06
BY RICHARD QUINN
TOMS RIVER BUREAU
LAKEWOOD — Lawrence Bathgate II sat behind the desk at his law office here, reading a story about Sovereign Bank Arena, the Trenton facility that plays host to concerts, hockey games and other crowd-drawing events.

So Bathgate, a former national Republican Party treasurer, called a friend in the New Jersey Devils' front office.

"If Lakewood were to build an arena, would the Devils operate it and bring a farm team here?" Bathgate asked.

That was in March. Within a week, Bathgate had arranged a meeting between the Devils owners and Township Committeeman Robert W. Singer. Nine months later, Singer boasted that a deal to build a $40 million to $50 million arena next to FirstEnergy Park was almost complete.

Then, last week, the plan abruptly fell apart.

The deal collapsed because of a combination of untested financial concepts and the opposition of a substantial portion of the Orthodox Jewish community, according to a half-dozen people who have followed the deal since discussions began last spring.

To pay for the project, Lakewood would have had to create a new taxing district — the first of its kind in New Jersey — and get state approval for a long-term financing plan.

Singer, who will recommend at tonight's committee meeting that the plan be abandoned, blamed the deal's implosion on an inability to guarantee the taxing district would be self-sufficient without affecting Lakewood property owners.

Devils owners Jeff Vanderbeek and Mike Gilfillan said the township's Orthodox Jewish community simply didn't back the project, effectively ending it.

Orthodox support was needed because the township land on which the arena would have been built is under contract to the for-profit Beth Medrash Govoha, the downtown rabbinical college that has transformed Lakewood into one of the country's largest Orthodox communities.

Some members of that college community, according to interviews and postings on Internet blogs, objected to paying for an arena it would not use out of a cultural belief that the atmosphere would be inappropriate for children.

"It's a combination of both," said Steven Langert, a former committee candidate who supported the project. "There are some who are going to say, "Why build it here?' I think it brings revenue to the town."

Lots of questions

When the Asbury Park Press first reported the arena deal in mid-December, people asked how the proposal would be funded.

"People had a lot of questions, and when you told them what the answers might be, they didn't like what they heard," Township Committeeman Raymond G. Coles said.

First, the township could only build the arena if it signed a new pact with Cedarbridge Development Corp., the for-profit arm of the rabbinical college, which already has a contract to develop a high-tech office park and age-restricted housing on 240 acres adjacent to FirstEnergy Park.

The plan was to build the arena on 7 acres that would have to be released from that contract.

Singer said a precarious funding scenario made the deal tough to sell to the Orthodox or any other constituency in Lakewood. The township would have had to create a Revenue Allocation District, using a little-known program that lets a town draw boundaries around a geographic area and use that area's tax revenue to pay off construction bonds.

Singer said he couldn't guarantee the district would cover the construction expenses, and if it didn't, the township coffers would have to pay leftover bills.

"There was no clear funding mechanism other than local real estate taxes," said former Mayor Marta Harrison. "And given the heavy real estate burden statewide, it didn't make sense to fund something like that."

Optimistic outlook

Bathgate had a different take. While declining to talk specific numbers, he said financial models show that the district could make its bond payments.

"The numbers can work," Bathgate said.

While the numbers may work, could the project advance if the Orthodox community — the largest ethnic group in Lakewood — wouldn't go to the arena?

"We don't want to have Elton John over here," Yehuda Shain, a former township committee candidate, said, quoting the sentiments of others he'd spoken to. "We don't want our kids to go there. We don't want our adults to go there. We should not support it."

Shain said community members appealed to the yeshiva's religious head, Rabbi Aryeh Malkiel Kotler, in opposition to the plan. That community outrage is what eventually doomed the plan, Shain added.

"There was basically no choice," he said. "When you have that many people go into Rabbi Malkiel Kotler . . . it was starting to come from so many different angles."

ON THE WEB: Visit our Web site, www.app.com, and click on this story's headline to read past stories on the Lakewood hockey arena.


Richard Quinn: (732) 557-5739 or [email protected]