During the Town Hall meeting on November 10, most residents questioned Mayor Shing-Fu Hsueh about the process for redeveloping the Princeton Junction Train Station, which hinges on council approval of more funding needed for consultants to study the area.##M:[more]##
Hsueh took it as another opportunity to express his concern that the project could become a dead issue if council doesn’t provide that funding — and without restrictions on what those consultants can study.
Resident Bill Benfer told the mayor that he felt the workshops conducted by Hillier were poorly done, and perhaps that’s why the process isn’t where the mayor would like it to be.
“Having attended those, I agree with many people that there wasn’t sufficient time allowed for feedback,” Benfer said, adding that the workshops left the impression that the plan would go through without attention paid to public input.
Hsueh told residents that according to the Hillier contract, phase one of the process was supposed to involve information gathering and generating ideas for the area. In the second phase, Hillier was supposed to gather input from the public and have direct dialogue with the council and Planning Board.
“At the end, council was supposed to give Hillier direction, and that was supposed to be what we were supposed to do,” Hsueh said. “But council decided to cancel all of these meetings, so we never got to that point.”
He said that because council was not satisfied with the work from Hillier, it instead chose to have a second look at the project. It voted to send the responsibility to the Planning Board to create a redevelopment plan for the project and have professional consultants study the area. Now it’s up to the council to provide the funding for those consultants’ proposals, and council has already indicated it may limit what those consultants can study.
Benfer asked him what would happen if the council decides not to fund the study or fund it without limiting the study’s scope.
“What I’m saying here is if council agreed to schedule a meeting after the June 4 (Hillier) presentation, that would be based on the original scope of services,” Hsueh said. “If they find money to do that with constraints, it will straight-jacket the whole process,” Hsueh added, echoing a statement he made to the council during a special redevelopment meeting just days before. “This is going to be mission impossible.”
One resident asked the mayor about the possibility of having a referendum about redevelopment because she feels that council will never make up its mind about redevelopment, but the mayor told her that it would be hard to draft a referendum question because it wasn’t a yes or no issue.
Another resident, Janet Lerner, said people would have to come out and vote on it, and in the last election, only 23 percent of people voted.
Resident Ed O’Mara told the mayor he believed “one of the most important aspects” of redevelopment are the parking garage and infrastructure, and that he worried whether the state would even have money to help pay for cleaning up one area of the zone that has been designated as a brownfield, since it is in the midst of financial crisis. Hsueh, however, said that the state has earmarked funds for that in the brownfield budget separately from the state budget.
Resident Lindsay Diehl said she felt “there’s a basic misunderstanding from the West Windsor people about what you’re trying to do with the redevelopment plan.”
“It’s really planned growth,” she added. “Without that, the developers will come in and do whatever they want.”
On another note, one resident also told the mayor that about eight or nine street lights on Canal Pointe Boulevard have been out since the summer, and urged him to have township officials fix them.
