The CCRC
The second project, which cost years and enormous effort and money, terminated in monumental frustration. There was, however, a silver lining.
Since the time of Abbot Martin, there had been concern about the financial needs of the abbey as distinct from the school. For decades, support of the monastery had depended on a steady flow of new, young, and salaried, monks to staff schools and parishes. Abbot Martin and the aging community, however, recognizing the need to supplement income to the abbey, looked to the land.
In the late sixties committees had been formed to make proposals for the use of the large tract of mostly wooded land to the southeast of the abbey and school buildings, centered around what had traditionally been called Forty Acres. Nothing came of these discussions at the time, but, as the years went by the financial need to find an alternate source of income became more pressing as the numbers of vocations diminished and as increasing numbers of monks retired from active teaching and parish duties.
The creation of a Continuing Care Retirement Community (CCRC) that became known as Abbey Woods was proposed, approved by the Chapter, and detailed plans laboriously developed. Thus began a decade long struggle with strongly opposed neighbors, the Township of Morris Planning Board, and finally, with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. In the end, after the project’s successful resolution with local boards, it was the New Jersey DEP that defeated it by rejecting permission for the link from the CCRC to the Township waste treatment line. The community made the decision not to pursue the matter further in the courts, and so the community was back where it started, except a good deal poorer from the loss of substantial sums invested during the many years of planning.
But the frustrated project was not the end of the story. The Trust for Public Land, a non-governmental organization that brokers open space conservation programs, put together an offer for the land from a consortium of state and local government agencies. On 28 July 2008, the Chapter approved the conveyance, via the TPL, of one hundred eighty-eight acres to the Morris County Park Commission for perpetual preservation without development for $13.75 million out of which the abbey had to repay investors some three million dollars.
Good news it would seem to have been, but as a result of this conveyance the land once belonging to St. Mary’s Abbey/Delbarton was now considerably reduced from the original almost four hundred acres and the potential long term income stream from the CCRC lost.