COLUMBIA FRUIT FARMS, INC., ET AL. VS. DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNITY AFFAIRS, ET AL. (DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNITY AFFAIRS) (A-3155-19)
Appellants are a group of twenty-nine New Jersey farms that maintained barns and other storage facilities on their properties. During the growing season, appellants housed farm workers in these structures. Despite this obvious change of use from structures intended to store agricultural products and equipment to residences for human beings, appellants refused to implement the additional fire safety measures required for residences by the New Jersey Uniform Construction Code (UCC), N.J.S.A. 52:27D-119 to -141.
In May 2018, the Director of the Division of Codes and Standards in the Department of Community Affairs (DCA) sent a letter to local construction officials reminding them of their responsibility to issue notices of violation when a farm failed to add fire suppression systems to the buildings in which their workers lived as required by the UCC. In March 2019, the Director sent a similar letter to the construction officials. As a result, the officials cited eighteen of the twenty-nine appellants for violating DCA's fire safety regulations between 2018 and 2019. None of these farms challenged the notices of violation.
On February 4, 2020, the Director sent a third letter to the construction officials again instructing them to enforce the change-of-use regulation when a farm converted a commercial farm building to residential living quarters for workers. The Director forwarded a similar letter to the New Jersey Secretary of Agriculture outlining the UCC requirements for residential structures used to house farm workers and the Secretary distributed that letter to a number of farms. Appellants thereafter filed a notice of appeal alleging that the Director's February 4, 2020 inter-agency letter to the Secretary constituted a "new agency rule" that DCA did not adopt in accordance with the rulemaking procedures required by the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), N.J.S.A. 52:14B-1 to -31.
The court rejected this argument and concluded the Director's February 4 letter bore few of the qualities that characterize a rulemaking activity subject to the procedural requirements of the APA as set forth in Metromedia, Inc. v. Dir., Div. of Tax'n, 97 N.J. 313, 331-32 (1984). Because the letter was not a new agency rule, the court dismissed appellants' appeal.
