From the Press of Atlantic City:
When Mario Schlenger looks out through the square glass panes in his kitchen doors, he sees a ghost town.
No one lives in the half-finished homes along Monet Drive behind his house. Brick houses sit empty with bare plywood for garage doors. Thin, frozen pools sprawl aimlessly through the sandy dirt of empty lots. An upside-down Magnavox television sits behind a garbage pile of crumbled cinder, baked bricks and plastic bags full of drink bottles.“It was beautiful back here and then they came along,” Schlenger says. He grunts in disgust and turns his white-bearded face away from the doors and toward the floor before finishing. “And made a mess of it.”
“They destroyed it,” his wife Diane adds.
What was once woodlands has become wasteland at the Glen Eyre housing development, one of the most decayed projects in the region left abandoned by bankrupt builders Kara Homes. It could cost more than $25,000 just to clean up the trash at the site, which means the township cannot even act on the problem right now without putting the project out to bid, the township administrator said.
While Hamilton may have one of the worst sites, safety hazards, lost tax revenue and inconvenienced residents living in neighborhoods of empty homes have highlighted problems at nine other Kara developments in southeastern New Jersey. Lacey, Little Egg Harbor and Stafford townships in Ocean County and Galloway Township, Atlantic County, are also among 18 towns in the state where Kara abandoned construction sites after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October.
Those towns’ governments and residents can only wait as Kara receives bankruptcy protection while sorting through the lengthy reorganization process.
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What looms larger now is a half-million dollars in missing tax money for the township. Stafford, which usually has a near-perfect tax-collection rate, saw that rate drop by almost a half-percentage point last year because of Kara’s problems.One Hamilton committeeman said Kara’s bankruptcy played a significant role in helping create a budget crunch in the township. While the township solicitor said it was only a small role, Perugini said the loss of tax dollars from Kara would be felt.
“This year we not only have the same expenses, we’re trying to do the same if not more with less revenue,” he said.
That money should come back to Stafford and Hamilton once the Kara properties are sold, a scenario both administrators consider a near certainty. Just last week the company began advertising an auction for smaller properties in Stafford and Little Egg Harbor townships, as well as developments in Toms River and Middlesex County.