In pushing for a meeting on Monday, April 7, with achitect Bob Hillier so it can give him direction in finishing the work under his contract, the West Windsor Township Council is again asking for help from planning consultants John Madden and Gary Davies.##M:[more]##
Council, which has not met with Hillier in nine months, has asked its consultants to highlight what data and information township professionals and council members still need from Hillier. Those reports will be presented on Monday, March 31.
Davies and Madden will be paid $15,”000 apiece for their work. Madden’s contract will be charged to the bond ordinance the council passed at the end of last year. It is up for approval during the council’s meeting on Monday, March 10. Davies’ proposal was executed at the end of February.
The decision came after more back-and-forth debate over whether the council should first pick a redevelopment scenario — with the scale of housing, retail, and office space it wants — or whether the number of lanes on Vaughn Drive should come first.
After it accepted redevelopment responsibility again from the Planning Board, council voted unanimously in January to bring Gary Davies and John Madden in on March 3 to review an August, 2007, Hillier memo. In doing so, the council emphasized the need to give Hillier direction with regard to its plans as soon as possible.
Madden began the discussion by saying he and Davies calculated that the number of meetings called for by Hillier in the memo would actually total about 48, to discuss issues including parking, traffic, and other things, and he didn’t know whether council was willing to budget for that.
However, Councilwoman Heidi Kleinman told Madden she was actually looking for the consultants to review the Hillier plans, as they would if they were reviewing a Planning Board application, pointing out things that make sense and things that don’t, along with a list of concerns. A lot of the things in the Hillier memo, like a financial committee, and discussions about Council on Affordable Housing requirements, have already begun, she added.
For example, she said the steering committee over the summer pointed out there wasn’t enough information regarding the amount of traffic that would be generated by Hillier’s plans — which she said all had the same traffic circulation patterns, even though the schemes had different densities — and that she wanted to know how much more information Davies needed in order to write a professional report about Hillier’s circulation plan.
But Davies said he could do no such report because there hasn’t actually been a traffic study completed. There are, however, four different people working on traffic circulation — Davies, Hillier’s engineers, Intercap Holding’s engineers, and the county.
“Nobody has done any traffic studies,” he said. “I have nothing to respond to. There needs clearly to be a merger.”
Intercap Holdings has just finished collecting the data for its traffic study, but is only beginning its traffic analysis. Davies said he expects “we will have a continuing dialogue with them, but I think that’s going to take months to get that work done.” Davies added that there are also still a lot of issues relating to the land use plan when it comes to the traffic study.
Councilman Charles Morgan reiterated that he felt the number of lanes on Vaughn Drive should be determined first, and then a land use plan follows. “It doesn’t matter what we build in the redevelopment area; it’s going to be three lanes. That’s a decision, if not made, ought to be the first decision made, not a result of a scenario of build out.” Further, “the community needs to decide how many lanes it wants to tolerate,” he said. “I think the community would prefer fewer rather than more.”
Davies disagreed, but also said the first thing that needed to be done was for a no-build traffic circulation study to be completed.
“That’s all true, but it seems to be that all of that has no bearing on how small or big of a bottleneck we want these roads to be,” Morgan said.
Still, Kleinman said she wanted to know Davies’ opinion on what the council should do with Vaughn Drive. Davies suggested he could do a quick study himself, but the numbers wouldn’t be final.
Morgan said, though, that he keeps coming back to the parking conundrum. The parking authority is still finishing its research into factors like the number of parking spaces that are needed and where a garage should be located. But you have to start someplace, he said, adding the council should start with Route 571, Vaughn Drive, and parking.
But “it’s not as simple as fixing up Route 571, a parking garage, and Vaughn Drive,” said Councilwoman Linda Geevers. “We have to have a comprehensive plan with a modest scope.”
Council President Will Anklowitz then asked the consultants to organize a discussion on what the council still needed to decide to move the project forward. Madden said decisions still needed to be made on the location of parking, floor-area ratios, whether or not to allow for second-floor apartments, and asking Hillier to come up with architectural guidelines.
Township Attorney Mike Herbert suggested the council form a consensus in terms of the general direction of the project and have Madden and Davies put forth what a general land use plan would look like, and use that to proceed with Hillier.
Davies said it seemed, though, like council wanted some “very early indications” of what’s going on with traffic, and suggested he could do a quick estimation similar to what he did in his presentation to council in November when he and Madden were proposing what they would study in working with the Planning Board.
“We have all of these plans,” said Kleinman, asking whether there was enough information to write a typical three or four-page memo that would “tell us we are building on something that our professional feels is worth foundation. Then we can decided when we get more of this factual traffic information coming in from all these studies.” She said the council shouldn’t meet with Hillier until all of its homework was done.
Davies said in order for him to write a three-page memo, he needs to do an analysis first, and if council wanted him to do that, he could.
“Why is that necessary to do before we meet with Hillier?” Anklowitz asked. “It’s a giant duplication of services to pay him to come up with a plan to analyze it. That’s what Hillier’s supposed to do.”
Acting township engineer Rob Korkuch suggested Davies and Madden put together a memo that included all of the missing pieces of information that the council should get from Hillier.
Morgan said the council should give the plans to Madden and Davies, along with the resolutions — guiding principles and the resolutions the council passed when it was giving guidance to the planning board — to lay out a road map that council can bring to the table when it meets with Hillier.
“We already know we want to focus on Main Street, whatever that might be, we know we want parking, and we know we don’t want huge, so they’ve got some concept plans with which to work,” he said.
Anklowitz asked them to finish the work by Monday, March 31, so the council can sit down with Hillier on Monday, April 7.
The council held discussion on the redevelopment attorney, reinstatement of the steering committee, and on the redevelopment entity for its meeting on Monday, March 10.
