Thanks, but no thanks. That was the message the West Windsor Planning Board sent to township council after deciding January 16 to wash its hands of the redevelopment plan for downtown Princeton Junction.##M:[more]##
Board members contemplated and discussed the action for two hours on January 16, before casting a 4-3 vote to send what has been referred to as a “political hot potato” back to council, with one abstention from Charles Morgan, who serves on both the board and the council.
If Morgan were to have voted no against the move, the tie 4-4 vote would have, by law, killed the resolution, and thus kept responsibility with the board. Morgan said in the next council meeting he abstained from the vote because he had publicly supported not sending it to the board in the first place, but also supported the council’s decision to stay hands-off if the board continued with responsibility. “I also thought it was a planning board decision, and not a council decision,” Morgan added. “As a member of council, I did not think it was appropriate for me to participate, so I abstained.”
Three months ago, the West Windsor Township Council sent the responsibility of designing a redevelopment plan for the 350-acre Princeton Junction train station area to the Planning Board in hopes of jumpstarting the planning process.
But the council’s alleged micromanagement of the board — a feeling brought to its head by a debate over the council’s recent “threshold” resolution — and board members’ feelings that the “council knows what it wants” with redevelopment, led board members to ultimately, yet narrowly, vote to send that responsibility back to council, despite council’s urging against the move and promise to remain hands-off.
Since the vote, the council has set up a meeting with Gary Davies and John Madden to review an August Hillier memo on the steps the firm thought the council should take in moving forward. Council members have said they don’t view the board’s decision as a monumental change, and that they believe progress has been made on their part.
In June, during a meeting with Hillier, council held off on taking any action giving direction to Hillier in proceeding, including hints as to what the council liked and disliked about the plan. The meeting was never rescheduled. In August, it passed guiding principles for proceeding with the process in the form of a resolution.
Then, in October, it handed responsibility to the Planning Board in coming up with a redevelopment plan for the area. In doing so, it asked the board to work with township professionals, the West Windsor Parking Authority, and Hillier to create a plan to submit to the township council.
The board was to focus on three priority topics: infrastructure/traffic, parking, and existing “as of right.” The board was challenged with determining whether the township can draft the plan one piece at a time, or whether a comprehensive plan for all 350 acres needed to be considered.
Township planner John Madden and traffic consultant Gary Davies were called in — in what some council members called a “second opinion” on the Hillier proposals — to determine whether a report can be made without looking at the zone in its totality. In their proposals to the planning board, the consultants said analyzing those infrastructure components without selecting one or more development scenarios would be impossible. They made proposals to the board asking it to choose a scenario or two so they can study the area and issue their reports. Instead, the board requested council input as to whether it would fund such a study and asked for guidance on the scenario to chose.
In response, council passed a detailed resolution with guidelines as to what it wanted to see done. It also passed a $200,”000 bond ordinance to fund the Madden and Davies proposals, the hiring of a redevelopment attorney, and a financial consultant, after it was discovered redevelopment funds were running low. In recent weeks, the council held a joint meeting with the parking authority, created a redevelopment finance committee, and also passed a threshold resolution that barred the administration from awarding contracts or making expenditures relating to redevelopment that exceeded $3,”150 without getting more than one quotation, and passed a resolution giving direction to the Parking Authority and the board.
The council majority said the threshold resolution was a matter of checks and balances, and it later came out that there was a possibility Davies and Madden would need more than asked for originally to complete the study based on all the work outlined for them by the council’s guidelines. There was also a miscommunication about whether they were charging the township for time used to make those proposals.
The resolution, nonetheless, hit a sour note January 9 with planning board members, who at first, thought the resolution meant they had to go out to bid for the work, saying it set an air of distrust on part of the council. Council held off on amending the resolution to soften it and clarify a bid process was not necessary until the board’s January 16 meeting.
Before the vote to hand back responsibility to the council, the planning board’s consultants also voiced their support of the move. Planning Board Attorney Gerald Muller said the various resolutions, recommendations, prerequisites, and the creation of the ad hoc committees and open mic sessions by the council had been discussed at the board level at length before “as really leaning toward a very fractured and diffused process.”
“Obviously the collaborative process hasn’t worked,” Muller told the board. “I just don’t see the board acting autonomously on the plan. Council has such an interest in this, and I don’t say that critically. That’s a good thing because council is the ultimate decision maker. They’ve been talking about concepts and procedures at great length, and I don’t see a process where we feel more on our own independently to prepare something without really a lot of further direction from council, which is the direction I think you want to go if you retain it.”
Further, he said, under the Local Redevelopment and Housing Law, the board would still be able to review the plan once it is prepared by council.
Township Planner Madden told the board that in light of all the talk about keeping costs in check, “I’ve got to tell you if Gary Davies and I go back and do the kind of work that you think has to be done, we are going to be duplicating services; we’re going to be going back and tracing over a lot of things Hillier’s done.”
But before the board began discussion about the decision, Morgan told the board that the council decided neither to amend nor revoke the threshold resolution at its January 14 meeting. “I think there was concern on council that any further work on anything would be provocative,” Morgan said.
At that meeting, council instead decided to have Council President Will Anklowitz send a letter asking the board to keep responsibility of the plan with only the observation of the last three resolutions — the guidelines written in August, the resolution it wrote in response to the Madden and Davies proposals, and the parking authority resolution it passed earlier this month. He said the general feeling on council was that the board could ignore the threshold resolution.
Board member Chuck Chang, however, said the council’s resolution, still advocates the need for a second party estimate to make sure the first is not out-of-line. Morgan pointed, as an example, to the consultants’ contracts the board approved earlier in the night that are approved on an annual basis. He said even though board Chairman Marvin Gardner told the board there were no increase in fees, he was just wondering if anyone checked the rates to see how great they were.
Gardner responded: “That’s one of the problems here — the suggestion that something is sinister or incorrect. Innuendo is not going to get us very far in this discussion.”
Gardner listed a number of reasons in favor of sending the responsibility back to council, including that in the conditions under the Hillier contract, the board doesn’t come into play until later in the process. “Even under the existing contract, we should not be doing this today,” he said. “If you follow the conditions, we’re still at a stage where a concept plan is supposed to be developed, and we’re nowhere near that.”
Further, he said, Davies and Madden were asked to do a traffic impact analysis in context of a 350-acre redevelopment area, and that they came back and told the board it wasn’t possible without looking at other elements of the plan.
“I see an ongoing series of problems developing if we continue to hold onto this,” Gardner said. “I think council knows exactly what they want. I think they should continue to hold it.”
In addition, even though state law requires that the plan go to the board for review after council develops it, “they don’t have to accept our recommendations — they can ignore us completely. In fact, when we present a plan to them, they can ignore a good part of the plan or all of the plan, or modify it.”
Gardner added: “So to conserve time and, more importantly, to save the taxpayers money, it’s important that the council do that.”
Throughout the discussion, some of the members said they understood why responsibility should be sent back to the council, but at the same time, they said they still had qualms about doing so. Steve Decter said he agreed and disagreed with Gardner, saying he felt the board would miss a “wonderful opportunity” to take a look at the train station and downtown area. “Under the circumstances, I think we should send it back, but I’m not optimistic about what’s going to happen when we do that,” he said. He also said he worried the council majority would limit the plan to the three components without considering other elements in the 350-acre site.
Board member Marty Rosen said he understood the reasons other members wanted to send it back to council, but said he felt some of those reasons were sometimes exaggerated by personal feelings. “The greater good is being overlooked to some extent,” he said. Still, “to begin at a very small, narrow scale like we’re being asked to do now, I agree with Steve we’re losing a big opportunity.” In the end, he voted against sending responsibility over to the council.
Morgan emphasized that if the board retained responsibility, the council would stand back. He said he even agreed with board members that the redevelopment finance committee set up by the council should not continue to hold meetings if the responsibility lies with the board. “As far as I’m concerned, I think the appetite on council to pass further resolutions is exhausted,” he said.
He said he worried the council would be stuck figuring out what resources to use if the responsibility was sent back, as it has no authority to negotiate contracts. “It’s just going to be a one-on-one with Hillier, which I think, frankly, is a mistake,” he said.
Mayor Shing-Fu Hsueh, who also sits on the planning board, said “any redevelopment projects, based on my own personal experience, will never get anywhere unless administration, council, and planning board are working together. If we cannot have mutual trust, then no matter who is in charge, we will get nowhere.”
He said he was content when the council moved the responsibility to the board in October, but he understands why the board became reluctant to take it on. “I respect my colleagues on the board when they decided on which way to go,” he said. “Either way, I want to be part of it. If necessary, I hope the planning board professionals will lend their support if council is willing to do it.”
“Actually, if this goes back to the council, still in some way, we all agree we want to move this project forward,” he added. “Council seems to be very clear in exactly what they want to do.”
Board member Diane Ciccone, who voted against the measure, said she felt the planning board should keep the responsibility because the threshold resolution was not binding on the board, and even though there was a possibility council won’t accept a final plan the board creates.
“Nothing’s ever a guaranteed,” she said. “I read (from Anklowitz’s letter) that we have assurances from the council that they were going to be hands off as much as they could be, and that they were asking us to do the work. I don’t think we should be in a position where we try to guess, and only do a plan based on if we think the council’s going to accept it. We know the guidelines. We’re supposed to be doing something that’s going to be a benefit for the community, environment, and region. I think we can do that and still work within the guidelines and parameters that we all know about.”
Board member Simon Pankove also voted against the measure, pointing to the “golden opportunity” the board had in creating a plan for the train station area with parking for everyone and tax ratables for the township, among other benefits.
Board member Debra Lemeshow, who could not make it to the meeting, sent a letter to the board said she didn’t see how the “impasse can be broken,” and that the council’s letter to the board “just appears to me to be more rhetoric and a facade” for council, which intends only to build a parking garage and beautify the main street. “They should just come out and tell the Planning Board to identify the necessary acreage for a garage, and stop fooling the community that we’re going through a process.” Still, she stated she would be very disappointed if the board revoked acceptance of the comprehensive plan because of the council’s tendency to want to ignore the whole redevelopment area.
The public also weighed in on the matter. Providence Drive resident Andy Bromberg said he felt the people who voted for the council majority were sacred by seeing the signs that 1,”000 more houses would come as a result of redevelopment. “I want a town center. I want a nice community center,” Bromberg said. “I’m seeing what’s happening in Plainsboro, and you guys are just pointing fingers as to who should have responsibility?”
“This is surreal to me that this is going on,” he added. “Please work together. Just do it. I saw those (Hillier) plans. The plans aren’t perfect. They’re pretty good. Hillier is one of the best in the world. What’s the problem? I don’t want to see gas stations and banks and old factories. I want to see something like what Plainsboro is doing, even better.”
Resident Jennifer Macleod said she felt the council was giving the planning board an impossible task in just focusing on the garage, main street, and road infrastructure. “There comes a time where you say, ‘I can’t do that. It can’t be done properly,’” she said. “If it can’t be done properly, you quit, and you don’t do it.” At the same time, however, she said handing it back to the council, hands it back to “a commanding vote of three people who keep insisting that it can be done in ways that it can’t be done.”
Windsor Drive resident Bob Akens, however, said regardless if there’s only three council members that make a majority, “a majority is a majority. It shouldn’t be thwarted out there as something that isn’t quite good. I think those three people are coming form a very strong experience of talking with people.”
Councilwoman Linda Geevers told the board during public comment that her position has always been that she supports and encourages the board to stay the course for the redevelopment process and to “play a critical role in the formulation of the final redevelopment plan.”
She said the planning board had a professional staff the council didn’t, and that the board can also hire other consultants to provide the expertise to create the plan.
“Now it feels like a rugby match — pass the ball, punt, and no one’s got a helmet on or padding,” she said. “Now it’s become one big political game, and that’s a shame, because it’s t
