The township’s Planning Board will hear the first application for preliminary and final major site plan approval that has been submitted by Princeton University for the first time in West Windsor’s history on Wednesday, October 7.
The hearing was originally scheduled for September 16 but was rescheduled because of a notice requirement.
Residents are not too thrilled with the university’s proposal for a maintenance yard addition that would include the construction of five 10,000-square foot storage/warehouse buildings on the university’s property to the west of Route 1 on a piece of farmland that stretches between Harrison Street and Washington Road. The site is located adjacent to watersheds for both the Delaware & Raritan Canal and the Millstone River.
In addition to the buildings, the plan also calls for outdoor storage areas, parking areas, landscaping, a bio-retention stormwater basin, driveways, and fencing. The university is seeking waivers for banked parking, the distance permitted between structures, screening landscaping, and bicycle spaces.
The plan states that the five buildings, to be built over time on site, will be designed to be semi-agricultural in style to fit in with the nature of the area.
However, nearby residents have some concerns, the most prominent of which concerns the water table in the area and their concern that it exceeds the 100-year flood plain levels. Residents feel that approval of the application would increase their burdens in dealing with the flooding of their homes that already occurs in the area. Residents are also concerned about traffic being brought into the area as a result of the proposed warehouses.
“Flooding is a problem along the Millstone as everybody knows,” said resident Michael Toney. “We don’t want this new construction to exacerbate it. The plans seem to infringe on the proposed Harrison Street realignment called for a few years back, and obviously we’re very interested in seeing it happen.”
The state Department of Transportation’s Penns Neck bypass project, which was proposed in 2004, called for the replacement of traffic lights on Route 1 between Harrison and Washington roads with overpasses.
