Sri Ramanuja Mission's Proposed Temple Project @ South Brunswick, NJ: First Zonal Board Hearing update

[Guest guest]

Srimathe Ranga Ramanuja Maha Desikaya Namaha:

 

Dear ALL,

 

Here's a summary of what happened y'day at the zonal board hearing in South Brunswick:

 

The meeting started off @ 7:45 PM. Our temple application came up for discussion at around 8 PM. Our lawyer presented our case introducing our project and called upon the first witness, Poondi Mama who represented the temple as the chairman of the temple trust.

 

He gave an introduction of Sri Ramanuja Mission, the parent organization of the proposed temple, who we are and why we are building a temple etc., and why we chose South Brunswick as the site. He gave an overview of the temple plan at the high level. He stayed away from presenting the nitty gritty details which will be dealt with by the other witnesses namely, our architect, our engineer, our land use planner and the traffic consultant in the subsequent meetings.

 

His presentation lasted for almost two hours and ended around 10 PM. Following that, there were questions from the zoning board members which were clarified by Mama and the lawyer. Our lawyer led the meeting in a very nice way interspersing with lots of questions to Mama during his presentation which I am sure helped address a lots of concerns from the public (related to how different are we compared to other temples in the area, traffic, crowd on the weekdays and weekends and festival days and how it might impact them) .

 

There was a short recess of 10 mins after which we reconvened for Q & A. The opposition camp was represented by an attorney who interrogated mama with lots of questions after which the public came with their own set of questions. The good thing is mama came up with excellent answers for all the questions asked by them. I felt that they were completely softened by mama's presentation as most of their questions were already covered by him. So they sounded repetitive.

 

The stage was set and the situation was daunting. To be honest , I as a spectator was trembling at the start of meeting. The pressure was enormous. I have to say that mama handled it to the best of his ability with proper guidance from our lawyer which appeased even some of the people from opposition camp some of whom came after the meeting and shared their feelings with us.

 

There's a lot of homework we had to do (mainly mama since he came back from India on Feb 12th in spite of jet lag) meeting with lawyer, chairman of zoning board and other key people. Mama and I have conveyed to Srimath Andavan about this meeting yesterday morning through Jagan. We are praying for HH's padukas' anugraham to get us through this.

 

Y'day was the first step in reaching our final goal. We still have a long way to go. The next meeting has been adjourned to March 4th evening. Couple of other witnesses from our side will be presenting (Engineer and Architect) on that day. We are anticipating that we will have one more meeting on March 18th where two more witnesses will be presenting our case further( land use planner and traffic consultant). During the next meetings, the same format will be followed where in the public and zonal members will be asking questions to the witnesses based on their presentation.

 

Finally they will open the floor to the public to place their comments. After the public comments, the zonal board members will make their decision and announce it to the audience. We are anticipating that subject to availability of time this might happen either on March 18th or April 2nd. This is a long drawn process but the good news is that we have started this yesterday on a right note.

 

Let us hope and pray that our application is approved. I will post a similar update after the next meeting.

 

Regards

 

Dasan

Venkat