As residents of Village Grande heard at their meeting January 18, developer Steve Goldin of Intercap Properties is no longer shy about his hopes for Intercap’s 25-acre office property on Washington Road and for the potential of the entire 350-acre redevelopment site.##M:[more]##
In addition to telephone surveys and focus groups that his staff have already conducted (and which, he says, show 90 percent support for redevelopment), Goldin also is taking these initiatives:
Goldin will be publicize his efforts with ads at the train station beginning Monday, January 28, and in area newspapers. He will also be presenting three alternative plans for a new “Main Street,” as Route 571 is being called, during a special Township Council meeting on Saturday, February 23.
In the works, he says, is a comprehensive design of the New Jersey Transit, municipal, and Parking Authority properties that he claims will yield 1,”000 new parking spaces for West Windsor residents at an affordable cost, while also addressing the needs of New Jersey Transit. He will be discussing those plans in the coming months by going door-to-door and presenting them on Sunday, May 18, at the Westin at Forrestal Center.
In the meantime, he also plans to upload a $60,”000 photorealistic video rendering of the Hillier Plan to his website and is preparing an on-line visual preference survey. He says he still hopes to host a trip to the Washington/Maryland/Virginia corridor to see examples of redevelopment projects there.
Goldin is also cataloging and researching other redevelopment projects around the nation with comparable communities to gather data about how much school children would actually be generated by redevelopment. At the Village Grande meeting, he suggested that under a redevelopment plan housing could be implemented in stages — if the first phase of units yielded more school age children than projected, further housing could be scaled back.
Other plans in the work include a $185,”000 traffic study with computer simulations and a fiscal impact model based upon phasing and timed growth models. At the meeting on January 18 Goldin suggested that the Township should avail itself of that data, and spend a much smaller amount to review it as part of its due diligence.
As the Township Council began to wrestle with redevelopment on January 22, that exact idea was presented. While Council was clearly reluctant to present itself as being in a partnership with Goldin, it nevertheless appreciated the opportunity to avoid duplicate spending.
— Cara Latham
