To the Editor:
Idea for Plainsboro:
Should It Secede?
With respect to Jasha Levi’s question in the September 12 issue on what to do about Plainsboro’s lack of recognition from Middlesex County, I offer the following idea:
Secession and annexation are common practices in the south when such issues arise.##M:[more]##
As Edisto Beach, South Carolina, grows beyond its current boundaries those areas regularly secede from Charleston County into Colleton County. Colleton has no objections as Edisto pays close to two-thirds of the total taxes for that county.
Conversely as Fairfax, Virginia, grows it regularly reaches out and annexes surrounding areas. Once annexed, Fairfax raises the tax rate to reflect the county services
Just depends on which side of the fence you are on as to how you look at this.
Howard & Braith Eldridge
205 Mather Avenue,
West Windsor
Good News On
Redevelopment
It was a pleasure to read a recent news report that says West Windsor council is finally seeing through the weeds and pushing redevelopment forward at the Princeton Junction train station. As a resident who lives within walking distance to the train (and grateful that I do because I can’t get a monthly parking permit!) and somebody who has been witness to the heavy traffic and congestion, I believe this redevelopment effort has been a long time coming.
It’s time for the council to work with the professionals and project developers to recreate a plan that benefits everyone. Now that we have some momentum, I urge our council members to stay focused. We’re finally all talking. It would be a shame if this issue got lost in all of the politics of the upcoming election. I hope our governing body remembers that they serve the public, which has voiced a unified support to move forward quickly. We will continue to speak out until we are heard.
I applaud the council for taking this pivotal step and ask that they keep redevelopment as a top priority — no matter where the political winds turn. Halle Madia
71 Cranbury Road
Let’s Move Ahead
I attended the West Windsor Council meeting this week, in which the town’s own planner and traffic engineer agreed that a developer, InterCap Holdings, has created the right redevelopment plan for the train station.
Council members talked about moving forward and refining the plan to respond public comment. Good. But from what we have seen from this Council, we need to hear something more specific and a definitive project timeline.
Redevelopment has been talked about for five years in West Windsor and it seems that we never get past the starting line. But now we have a plan, we have a developer, we have private financing, and we have consensus.
All we need is the Council to work with their professionals to create a condensed schedule for how we get from the conceptual stage to construction. Before the township enters another political season, let’s move redevelopment forward — once and for all.
Nora Matlin
West Windsor
Turning the Corner
With the West Windsor Council’s decision on Monday, September 15, to move forward with redevelopment at the train station, I believe our elected officials are finally turning the corner and becoming the proactive governing body that people want them to be.
I join many of my fellow residents in expressing appreciation to the majority of the governing body, which has recognized that the issue of redevelopment has sat on the backburner for too long. I am thrilled with the fact that the redevelopment plan can be adopted by the beginning of 2009, ensuring that West Windsor capitalizes on the offer by private investors to create the type of project that can be the envy of the entire state.
I urge the Council to keep their professionals’ feet to the fire and ensure that a redevelopment plan is adopted. It would demonstrate that our Council has vision, follow-through, and recognizes that its constituents truly want their antiquated train station redeveloped.
Frank P. Donnangelo, Ed.D.
368 Blanketflower Lane,
West Windsor
Not So Fast
On Redevelopment
I have been very encouraged by the recent letters that have been submitted questioning the wisdom of the West Windsor Council and Mayor on their endeavor to redevelop the Railroad Train Station who’s main purpose will be to attract more commuters at the expense of serious tax consequences and on the quality of life to West Windsor residents.
The Mayor and Town Council are obviously in Cloud 9, completely unaware of the economic crisis that is happening. Amtrak is experiencing losses, New Jersey is in a state of bankruptcy, foreclosures in West Windsor are six times what they were last year, and the Federal government is on the brink of economic collapse.
I suggest that they read the two page advertisement that appeared in the September 7 New York Times (pages 20 and 21) signed by well known economists including Paul Volcker and P. E. Peterson (former Secretary of Commerce) on the serious economic crisis facing this nation. The message is that we have become a debtor nation with a $53 trillion debt, or $466,”000 per household — about 10 times the median annual income of these same households. They cite the annual trade deficit of $800 billion, out of control health care costs, entitlements, and that we are in a dangerous position to foreign lenders who own half of our debt.
This is not a time to embark on extravagant expenditures but to downsize expenditures in order to avoid a future taxpayer rebellion.
Sam Greco
18 Hathaway Drive,
Princeton Junction
Transit Village Q&A
PJ: I heard West Windsor is considering a transit village. Could you tell me what is happening.
WW: A couple years ago the mayor thought maybe West Windsor should transform itself into a transit village. He hired the Hillier Group to do a design.
PJ: Did he give them specifics on what he wanted?
WW: Not really, just told them to design something that was a transit village and give West Windsor a town center and some more parking.
PJ: What did Hillier come up with?
WW: The design had 1,”000 condos and the centerpiece was a tunnel connecting the New York bound side to the Trenton bound side of the train platform.
PJ: The centerpiece was a tunnel???
WW: Yes.
PJ: You must be joking — Hillier proposed the centerpiece of your town to be a tunnel?
WW:Yes, that does sound pretty ridiculous when you think about it.
PJ: Was the Hillier study free?
WW: No, we paid him $400K for it
PJ: Unbelievable. Was it a federal earmark or something?
WW: No, we paid with township funds — from our property taxes.
PJ: What!!!! That costs each taxpayer $50, and it doesn’t sound like you got anything of value for your money. Don’t you guys in West Windsor care about how high your property taxes are?
WW: Our taxes are outrageous – even in tough economic times they continue to increase. I wish the town government would focus on reducing taxes instead of finding new ways to spend our money.
PJ: How about the 1,”000 condos. Won’t that generate demand for more school kids?
WW: Hillier initially said that it would only add 30 kids to the school district. Then he revised upward to 300 kids.
PJ: 300 kids? West Windsor has one of the top school districts in the country. Sounds odd that a lot of people would not want to take advantage of 1,”000 new condos.
WW: Well, the township average is over 1 school child/home, so I guess that would mean we might have 1,”000 more school kids.
PJ: Whoa. Doesn’t school cost about $12,”000 year per kid? That is $12,”000,”000 yearly just for additional schooling costs — not counting the cost of building new schools.
WW: I hope someone is looking at this closely. The schooling impact alone could add $3,”000 a year to every household’s taxes. And I thought one of the big reasons we invested our tax dollars in open space was to reduce the potential population growth and urban sprawl.
PJ: Sounds like the plan that Hillier did for the mayor has tons of additional taxes associated with it. Good thing you guys terminated that contract.
WW: Actually, we are paying Hillier even more money now.
PJ: For what? You guys didn’t get anything from the first $400,”000 don’t you think this is throwing good money after bad.
WW: Sure does sound that way doesn’t it?
PJ: How about the Goldin study?
WW: Sounded good to start, then when you start getting down to the rubber meeting the road you see all he is going to do is build 996 condos. The rest of his plan depends on others doing development they may or may not want to do. And don’t get me talking about the Hamilton debacle or Edison rejecting his transit village proposal a couple months ago.
PJ: Do you need 1,”000 condos for improvements and a town center?
WW: No way. Look at what Plainsboro did — we should use that as a model.
PJ: Back to this transit village concept — why do you want to be a transit village and provide parking for the region’s commuters?
WW: I don’t want our town to have to foot the financial and quality of life costs to solve the region’s commuter needs. All I want is parking for our residents and some more restaurants, small retail and things looking better on 571. For the life of me I can’t figure out how that turned in to a transit village and 1,”000 condos. The cost to increase parking — and most of the increased parking slots are for non-West Windsor residents — will be $2,”000 a year. The increased parking will give us more parking slots than MetroPark.
PJ: Do you guys want to be the next MetroPark?
WW: NO! I love our town and don’t want to do anything to ruin it.
Mike Baxter
Landing Lane, West Windsor
Intercap’s Plan
Will Not Work
The Intercap redevelopment plan currently before Council, like the Hillier plan before, not only fails to address the shared vision of a majority on council, as represented in Council resolutions 2007-R116 and 2007-R238, with respect to the overall scale (e.g., number of homes proposed) but also fails to follow the clear direction provided by our redevelopment authority with respect to what a mixed use development means, how much regional traffic West Windsor is prepared to accept, and how much risk its taxpayers want to take should the .28 school students per unit built by Mr. Goldin prove to be too low given the quality of West Windsor schools.
Most surprisingly, in spite of the “Support Main Street” buttons that Mr. Goldin’s public relations team was handing out at the September 8th meeting, Intercap moved Main Street from Route 571 to Mr. Goldin’s 25 acres, and then eliminated Main Street altogether — replacing it with “our” square.
To add insult to injury, Mr. Goldin’s “take-it-or-leave-it” hubris leads him to attack Council, symbolically through Council President Morgan, further poisoning a decision-making environment that is crying out for a genuine, village-oriented redevelopment plan designed by an experienced New Urbanist architect who is not looking at netting $50 million from a $280 million development, counting just the 700 market rate units that will sell for $400,”000 each according to Mr. Goldin’s fiscal analysis.
After so many years of discussion, this plan expresses the same reality West Windsor residents experienced in the Hillier process: assemble a few residents to get input, claim it is a people-generated plan and then propose what makes the builder the most money and/or a scale needed to build the infrastructure needed to support the scale proposed. At least in the Hillier plan, “amenity” meant something more than retail shops and parking garages.
Given that Mayor Hsueh’s definition of “mixed use” had been multiple uses on the same acre, his support for a plan that puts condos here, offices there, and parking garages in yet another location across the 350-acre redevelopment area is as disquieting as his claims that state funding will be forthcoming once West Windsor has a redevelopment plan, especially in a financially troubled economy.
One would have expected that the Mayor’s stated goals of making redevelopment tax positive, with a “high priority” placed on traffic levels, would have led him to abandon Mr. Goldin’s design of his legacy now that West Windsor’s own professionals confirm that West Windsor residents will drown in regional traffic in a plan that has no stated financial support from West Windsor’s neighboring townships and from no government entity.
We can only hope that Mr. Hillier has been listening and will deliver a redevelopment plan by October 20th that is about a village, and not the suburban office park we saw the first time around, at a price that we can all afford and that Mr. Goldin starts wearing one of his own “Support Main Street” buttons even as he is faced with his third strike, having swung and missed in both Edison and Hamilton.
Farrell Delman
102 Bear Brook Road,
West Windsor
From the Editor:
A letter in the September 12 issue concerning property tax increases in West Windsor was headlined “Did West Windsor Exceed State Cap?”
The writer of the letter, Joe Pascal, originally submitted the letter with a different headline, “Accountability Without Distractions.” Letter writers should be advised that the News reserves the write to condense letters as space constraints dictate and to correct factual and typographical errors in letters. While we welcome suggestions for headlines, the final headline is determined by constraints of column widths and layouts.
Please submit letters directly to our editor, rein@wwpinfo.com, or by mail to Box 580, West Windsor 08550.
