Opinion ID: 2339947
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Powers of Council.

Text: The basic power of the Council is to grant or withhold substantive certification; the Council also has the further power to impose conditions on its grant and the implied power to accelerate its denial. We believe that the Council may use its power to grant or deny substantive certification in a multitude of ways in order to accomplish its mission of bringing about statewide compliance with the Mount Laurel obligation. That power is considerable, since denial of substantive certification may result in Mount Laurel litigation brought by a builder, a consequence that the Act was designed to avoid and that most municipalities want to avoid. The Council has the implicit power to condition substantive certification on the inclusion of ordinance provisions for mandatory set asides or density bonuses. § 11a(1). The power of a municipality to include such provisions in its housing element, indeed the requirement that it must consider them is explicit, id.; the sense and structure of the Act necessarily implies the power of the Council, in an appropriate case, to condition substantive certification on such inclusion. Accelerated denial of substantive certification would presumably be reserved for a specific kind of case, one where the circumstances strongly persuaded the Council that its role in achieving compliance with Mount Laurel called for such unusual action on its part. The Council may have the power, once its jurisdiction is invoked, to require the municipality to pursue substantive certification expeditiously and to conform its ordinances to the determination implicit in the Council's action on substantive certification. [19] While the language of the statute could support a contrary conclusion, that conclusion would allow a municipality to use all of the energies of the Council, presumably for the purpose of determining its Mount Laurel obligation through the Council rather than the courts, all the way up to the point at which substantive certification is about to be determined, and then to withdraw from the matter. While we do not pass on this question for all cases, it seems clear to us that all of the cases before us today fall into a special class: practically all of them have been in litigation for a considerable period of time; the cost of this litigation has been considerable, the proceedings often complex, and in many cases the ultimate disposition is not too far off; furthermore, the prospect of producing lower income housing is likely. Under those circumstances, the use by any of these municipalities before us today of the procedures of the Council without thereafter complying with the Council's determination would constitute a gross perversion of the purposes of the Act, as well as an imposition on both the courts and the Council. It would be beyond the understanding of any citizen if our system of government allowed a municipality, about to conform to the requirements of our Constitution after years of litigation for that purpose, to have its case transferred to an administrative agency, allegedly for the purpose of meeting that same constitutional obligation in a different, yet permissible way, and thereafter, at the last moment, several years later, simply to walk away and say, in effect, I choose not to comply with either the courts or the administrative agency set up by the Legislature. We believe the Legislature never intended such a result and presume the Council will not permit it.