A preliminary report is on tap for early September after council members, planning board members, and residents voiced their interests in seeing some data on the fiscal impact the InterCap deal could bring to West Windsor.
At the Town Council’s meeting on August 15 Councilwoman Linda Geevers recommended that the redevelopment finance committee be reinstated “to participate in the formulation of a fiscal impact analysis report.”
“I think that it’s very important that the Council be involved with the formulation of this report, and I agree with residents that we should at least see a preliminary report now rather than waiting until we get a report at the site plan review. I think that’s a little late and anybody doing a project this size must have some preliminary numbers,” she said.
Council President Kamal Khanna pointed out that fiscal analysis is going on two fronts, one by the administration and one by Intercap. At the August 17 Planning Board meeting Mayor Hsueh said that the administration will present the council with a preliminary report ahead of the meeting September 12, one week before a vote on the settlement agreement is planned.
Councilwoman Diane Ciccone was not yet appointed to the Council when the redevelopment finance committee held meetings two and three years ago. Recognizing public interest in learning more about the settlement, she told Geevers she would support additional meetings if they can add value.
“I’m not suggesting another committee, I’m suggesting that if there was valuable information or conclusions gathered (from the redevelopment finance committee) they should be woven into the studies going on today. I think the public may or may not understand that at some point every one of us has supported this settlement and I think every one of us has issues with pieces of the settlement,” Ciccone said.
Councilman Charles Morgan said that the previous redevelopment finance committee never finished its work before disassembly in 2009. Morgan recalled that there were extensive minutes from those meetings, including one featuring a presentation from a Rutgers professor that addressed concerns over the number of additional students the development could bring to West Windsor.
“We stopped the work because the mayor saw it as creating obstacles rather than being helpful to the process,” Morgan said.
Morgan, who was a member of that committee, said the council was hamstrung and he wished that the township’s chief financial officer was brought in to the finance committee meetings in years past. He added that it is illegal under state law for him to even talk to the chief financial officer, so the town’s administration would have had to approve it.
At the planning board meeting on August 17 Chairman Marvin Gardener supported the document review.
“Those of us who have done fiscal impact analyses in various other enterprises prior to today are aware that you can’t specifically predict outcomes so what you do is you take the same variables and get different numbers and see how far apart they fall. Then you will have a worst-case scenario, a best-case scenario, and then there will be intermediate scenarios.”
Gardener says the council cannot go wrong in asking for the analysis.
“Nobody should be apprehensive about giving the public the accurate story because no one really knows the accurate story. You should give them all the scenarios so people understand it and no one will be excited and get concerned because we’ve gone through an exhaustive study — and it should be our study, not the developer’s study,” he said.
Gardener specifically pointed out the transit village’s proposed promenade as the “one public amenity” and its potential for impacting the town as a centerpiece of attraction in the redevelopment area.
