Redevelopment of the Princeton Junction train station area is back where it began more than a year ago: In Township Council moving forward as the West Windsor Township Council began with “a clean slate” in determining its next steps.##M:[more]##
In the first meeting it held since having redevelopment responsibility placed back in its hands, and vowing to begin with a “clean slate,” Council voted unanimously to bring Gary Davies and John Madden in for a March meeting to review an August, 2007, Hillier memo highlighting the process the consultant sees in moving forward and to determine what, if any, part they would play. In doing so, the council emphasized the need to give Hillier direction with regard to its plans as soon as possible.
At the same time, council members said they thought they had made progress and are already on par with Hillier’s suggestions in that memo with regard to where the redevelopment process should be headed. And next steps could include township examination of a proposed $185,”000 traffic study by Intercap Holdings CEO Steve Goldin, which council members said could save taxpayer money if done by the private sector, yet monitored closely by township professionals.
The discussion began at the January 22 meeting when Councilman Charles Morgan brought two draft resolutions to the dais. One would reformat the steering committee to include only the mayor and the two members of council and removing Planning Board Chairman Marvin Gardner, since the board is no longer involved in the process. The second would self-designate the council as the redevelopment entity. Morgan said the second resolution would help the council tackle issues about how the process would be administrated under a Faulkner Act form of council and set out the responsibilities of both the council and the mayor.
“We need to get our team together,” Morgan said, pointing out that Goldin has already begun pushing his ideas around and noting that the Dreher Group, of Princeton, was “getting control over a lot of property from the Rite Aid site all the way up to the Sun Bank on Route 571.”
Second, he said, the council needed to know which consultants were going to aid the council to get the Hillier contract squared away. “We want to get to March with a team in place, decisions made as to who’s doing what, and getting Hillier re-engaged and moving forward,” he said, adding that Andy Lupo, of the Parking Authority, also needed to be at the table for the conversation.
Mayor Shing-Fu Hsueh said that what needed to be done now was that “we go back to where we left off.” In doing that, the planning board consultants, who are already familiar with the issues, should be involved, he said. Further, the council should use the technical information Goldin said he was going to provide with his traffic study, but have it looked at by the township’s own professionals. “It’s just like any of the applications coming in,” Hsueh said. “We have our professionals working with them to make sure they are doing the right things.”
“Let’s try to work together to come up with some ideas with directions,” for Hillier, he added. “If you don’t like something, tell him. If you want the scale to be reduced to 20 percent and 10 percent, talk about that and give him a clear direction in which way to go.”
Councilwoman Linda Geevers said there were still concerns over responsibilities of the council as to whether it or the mayor should be responsible for hiring the redevelopment attorney and whether the council wanted to stay with Madden and Davies or whether it was going to pursue the help of other professionals. She suggested that the township professionals look at the Hiller plans and give an executive summary of those plans. “It’s just some baby steps but very important steps so that we can move forward and not be tripping over each other,” she said.
That’s when Councilwoman Heidi Kleinman suggested the August 20, 2007 memo from Hillier to the steering committee should be addressed. “This was a memo from August, yet we have, in our own way accomplished many of the things in this memo,” she said. “The Planning Board’s decision to not take on the responsibility really is not a monumental change to me.”
The memo suggested setting up a committee to discuss redevelopment finances, which the council has already done with the Redevelopment Finance Committee, which has already begun meeting, she said. The memo also suggested having Urbitran do a review of the traffic and circulation.
However, Goldin, in his presentation at Village Grande on January 18, has stated his organization will be doing an even more extensive traffic simulation study and is willing to pay the $185,”000 he estimated it would cost to have it done. That study, she said, would expand all the way up to South Mill Road, and is information that could be very valuable. “I don’t see any reason to engage Urbitran to write a review of the traffic circulation issues as proposed until we get the results of that study,” she said. “I do think Urbitran is surely the right person on our team to oversee that that study is being done to a quality level.”
Morgan and Hsueh voiced their support for the idea. Said Morgan: “I think what you’re saying, and I totally support it, is that it’s insane to have two different firms do the same study when one firm hired by the private sector is gong to do the work anyway and if the government, for a lot less, would ask its professionals to review it.”
The memo also suggested the council set out responsibilities for John Madden and that it have a discussion on affordable housing, which the council has already scheduled during its meeting on Monday, February 11, when Planning Board attorney Gerald Muller and Township Attorney Mike Herbert will present how the newly proposed Council on Affordable Housing regulations would affect Wet Windsor, Kleinman said.
The next thing highlighted by the memo is for the council to hold three public meetings on finance, traffic, and other issues. It also suggests a meeting with landowners and residents, which also has been scheduled for Saturday, February 23, and a meeting with the Parking Authority, which the council also already held in December. The last page of the memo lists the recommended scope of work Hillier was suggesting for his work in finishing up the contract. “I think this is an important piece of the dialogue, and the one reason we need to bring him in,” Kleinman said, adding that council can tell Hillier that it has implemented many of the steps suggested in the memo, and go from there.
“We are following good practice of planning on a large scale,” Kleinman said. “I think we’re doing a pretty good job up here.”
Morgan called the memo “a great roadmap” and said it needed to be brought up to date, but he also said the council needed to meet with Hillier soon so that it can have a representative come out to the February 23 meeting with landowners and residents and so that the council can have closure on the contract. “In the meantime, we do have activity,” he said. “We ought to engage all the players to get their input as to goals and responsibilities, and Hillier’s a player in that conversation.”
When Hsueh suggested the council invite Gardner to the meetings, Council President Will Anklowitz and Morgan emphasized that the board “invited themselves out” of the discussions. Hsueh said he felt everyone should be working together to make the project successful.
Anklowitz also said it was important that the council give direction to Hillier as soon as possible. “It’s not a theory the developer’s going to come along. He’s here. We need to get there, and quick,” he said.
Kleinman said she wasn’t making a decision “based on the assumption of what I want it to be. I want to know the facts, and I don’t believe in a developer-driven process.”
“If we want to, we can pay for our own traffic study, but it doesn’t make any sense to me,” she added. Goldin is “already engaged in doing that. I just want to have enough money to make sure our consultant oversees that process. Steve Goldin can promise lots of things, but we need to chart our own course.” (See sidebar, page 13.)
After the meeting, Kleinman emphasized that the council “is looking for ways to control costs and not duplicate services being provided from other sources,” as the basis for her support in capturing Goldin’s traffic numbers. She said that the Department of Transportation, the township, and other individual landowners have done traffic studies, and Hillier used all of the available data in its review. With Goldin’s numbers, the township can have its own consultants interpret the data. “Our analysis would be separate from the analysis Steve Goldin might do with the data. We would be foolish to not wait and include the most up to date data if we know it will be available in March.”
She compared it with allowing the Parking Authority to pay for a study to determine the best way to define appropriate parking solutions. The authority has offered to do that study and provide the results to the township to interpret with the township planner.
Council members said they felt the proposals made by Davies and Madden to the planning board were dead. “That’s the planning board’s process,” Kleinman said. “Now, it’s our job.”
The council then voted unanimously to pay Madden and Davies for their work in reviewing the Hillier memo and appearing before council to discuss it on March 3. The two draft resolutions were set for discussion for Monday, February 25.
