In Larry McGill’s case, the opportunity to get more involved in the community has come knocking — twice. McGill was appointed to the West Windsor Planning Board in January for the second time, this time to replace former Planning Board Vice President Steve Decter.
While there have been some rumors in the community surrounding Decter’s departure from the board and the new appointment, the mayor — who, by law, is responsible for appointing the members of the Planning Board — said he chose McGill to replace Decter because he was a candidate who has a background that differs from that of the rest of the members, which will create more diversity on the board. He lives in Sherbrooke Estates, a geographical area of town which had little representation on the board prior to McGill’s appointment.
McGill initially served on the board for a one-year appointment from July, 2006, through June, 2007. However, McGill took a job as the senior vice president for research at the Foundation Center, a company that analyzes patterns of foundation-giving in the United States, a short while later and found himself “trying to find out how to balance the commute with the Planning Board responsibilities,” he said. “It was a significant change.”
Prior to taking that position, McGill had been working at Princeton University, where he specialized in art and cultural policy, and McGill wanted to get accustomed to commuting to New York City before returning to the board.
In January, there was an opening on the board. Both Planning Board Chairman Marvin Gardner and Hsueh said the reason Decter left the board was because he never took a course that was required of him by state law to serve on the board. “It was a requirement that a course must be taken within 18 months from the time of your appointment,” unless you are a member of the board when the regulation went into effect, explained Gardner. Decter’s time expired, and there were no courses available for him to take, so he had to step down from the board.
Hsueh said he tries to make sure that all of the Planning Board members he appoints cover various demographic and geographic areas of the town. For example, Gardner and Diane Ciccone are both lawyers; Marty Rosen is an environmental professional; and Chuck Chang is a retired industrial hygienist. “If you look at every single individual, they all have a very specialized area in the planning,” says Hsueh.
McGill, who is married and has three kids — a son at the Pennington school, another son at High School South, and a daughter who attends Millstone River School. His father was an architect, and his mother was a piano teacher and church organist. He grew up in suburban Oklahoma, eventually making his way to Chicago for about 8 years, where he earned his Ph.D in sociology. He moved to New Jersey in 1988, lived in Lawrenceville for a little while, and then moved into Sherbrooke in June, 1994.
McGill said he became interested in what was occurring with local area activities, and once the Princeton Junction redevelopment process started a few years ago, citizen participation just seemed like the thing to do. “I started following it quite closely,” he said. “I started to get to get to know some of the people who were working on the redevelopment process.”
As time moved on, he got more involved and was eventually appointed in 2006. With regard to redevelopment, McGill says he wanted to view the plans from the perspective of both Sherbrooke and the future of West Windsor as a whole in general.
“I was particularly interested in making sure the discussion of circulation and traffic was thoroughly covered,” he said. “I thought we spend a good amount of time on that in the first two meetings to the point where it seemed plausible at least that the circulation plan, as designed, was going to work probably as best as the circulation plan in that kind of environment could work.”
While he was able to attend the board’s first meeting to review the draft redevelopment plan that was sent to council, he was not able to attend the second meeting, during which the board voted on recommendations to send back to council (see story page 12).
“What I found very interesting is that this has been a terrific opportunity to get more involved in the community life in West Windsor,” McGill said. “There are opportunities I think that are worth taking advantage of, with the prospect of redevelopment, with the prospect that citizens have a say in the overall direction that the community goes. I think it’s time for us to all say, ‘What can we contribute?’”
