Bill Van Ness's Instinct Was to Fight the Plan to Build A School Next to His Factory
But could he beat eminent domain?
The letter that landed on Bill Van Ness's desk one morning in May 2005 was only five sentences long, but it packed a punch. The Board of Education for the city of Clifton, New Jersey, the letter explained, was interested in buying a 2.2-acre parcel owned by Van Ness Plastic Molding, a manufacturer of pet supplies. If the parties couldn't agree on a price amicably, the board could condemn the property and seize it using the power of eminent domain. Either way, Van Ness was going to lose the land. One thought ran through his head: "I want to expend all possible legal means, regardless of cost, to beat this."
Just a few months earlier, Van Ness had purchased the property from the city of Clifton for $1.1 million and begun making plans to expand his company's parking lot and add a separate driveway to accommodate the 25 tractor trailers that rumbled in and out of his 160,000-square-foot factory each day. Instead, he now faced the prospect of having 1,700 students next door. "The athletic field would be right next to our driveway," Van Ness says. A call to his insurance broker confirmed the worst: It would probably drop the company's commercial automobile coverage if there was even one accident involving a student.
Van Ness was stunned. His father, Paul, had founded Van Ness Plastic Molding in 1945. Five decades later, the company was a fixture in Clifton. By 2005, it had 225 employees and was churning out roughly a million items, from dog food bowls to kitty litter boxes, every week, for customers such as Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) and Target (NYSE:TGT). Now the possibility of relocating the business to China--or shutting it down altogether--seemed all too real.
Van Ness's woes began in December 2004, when Clifton voters approved a $15 million bond issue to pay for the purchase and conversion of an old industrial building a few doors down from the Van Ness facility on Brighton Road. The building would accommodate 500 freshmen from Clifton's public high school, the second largest in New Jersey, with almost 3,400 students.
Van Ness was surprised that Clifton wanted to open a school in an industrial part of town. But what happened next was shocking. A few months after voters approved the bond issue for the annex, the school board proposed a plan to expand the freshman building to accommodate an entire middle school. To do so, the board sought to issue an additional $49 million in bonds, pending voter approval, and use part of the proceeds to acquire the Van Ness land.
The day he received the board's letter, Van Ness called his corporate lawyer to plan his legal strategy. The attorney's response was blunt: Don't bother going to court. A year earlier, he reminded Van Ness, another business on Brighton Road, Mayer Textile Machine, had lost a similar battle. Rather than wasting money on a fruitless legal case, the attorney advised, Van Ness should fight the school board by convincing voters to vote against the second bond issue. He urged Van Ness to contact the Marcus Group, a public relations firm in Secaucus, New Jersey, that specializes in crisis communications. Van Ness was skeptical. He had never worked with a PR firm. What's more, the voters had passed the first referendum by a 2-to-1 margin. How could he reverse that momentum?
Two days later, another corporate attorney gave him the same advice and recommended he call one of the lawyer's golf buddies--a PR pro named Alan Marcus, owner of the Marcus Group. With two referrals pointing to Alan Marcus, Van Ness decided to hear the guy out.
A week later, Van Ness and his then 26-year-old son Will, his right-hand man at the company, drove to Secaucus to meet Marcus and several of his executives. For two hours, the group sat around a conference table as Van Ness described his predicament. Marcus and his team explained how they could drum up opposition to the referendum--TV commercials, direct mail, phone campaigns, expert witnesses to testify about safety issues. Van Ness took it all in, including the estimated cost of at least $100,000, and left to think it over. At the end of the meeting, Marcus patted Van Ness on the back and assured him they'd win. Says Van Ness: "I walked out of there with my son and said, 'This guy's nuts!"
The Decision
Van Ness bounced the question off all of his trusted advisers: his son, lawyers, and friends who knew how small-town politics work. Everyone agreed that a legal fight seemed pointless. Convinced that PR was his best option, Van Ness hired the Marcus Group.
They hatched a plan on two fronts. To open the annex, the Board of Education needed a variance from the town because the property was in an industrial zone. No variance, no annex--and, Van Ness's logic went, less chance that voters would pass the second ballot measure for the larger school. With the Marcus Group's help, Van Ness gathered experts in city planning, architecture, and traffic patterns to argue before the zoning board that the industrial site was unsafe for a school. Throughout the summer, Will Van Ness distributed fliers and antischool lawn signs to homeowners on Brighton Road to rally grass-roots support. Despite the very public battle, the elder Van Ness opted not to discuss it with his staff--about 20 percent of whom live in Clifton--because he didn't want to create anxiety. "I don't know what I would have said except that we were at risk and we were fighting it," he says.
At the hearing about the variance in August 2005, dozens of neighbors and Van Ness workers turned out to support him. The Board of Ed's attorney, Anthony D'Elia, says he was expecting some opposition from Clifton residents, but he was surprised to see Van Ness. Zoning board members peppered the Board of Education's first witness, a civil engineer who worked on the school plan, with questions about truck traffic on Brighton Road. When the Board of Ed's attorney acknowledged that a formal traffic study had not been done, the zoning board pointedly told him to do one. The meeting adjourned after an hour.
The hearings dragged on for months, and the fight got personal. At one public meeting in October, D'Elia pointedly questioned Van Ness's motives, implying that he was more concerned about his business than safety, which prompted the audience of more than 100 people to "cheer and guffaw at the spirited repartee between the two men," according to an account in The Record, a local newspaper. Van Ness says he was labeled by board members and others as a rich, out-of-town businessman who didn't care about working-class Clifton. He countered that his business pays $300,000 in property taxes every year and that its $5 million payroll provides jobs to blue-collar workers. In the end, his PR firm advised him to stop talking to the press and also stop talking at meetings to focus the debate on the schools, rather than his personal life.
