Redevelopment once again was the biggest topic discussed by Mayor Shing-Fu Hsueh and about 15 residents at his second Town Hall meeting of the year on April 5.##M:[more]##
Hsueh told the residents that he is hoping that a redevelopment plan for the 350-acre Princeton Junction train station area will be adopted by council by the end of this year.
The mayor began the Town Hall meeting by giving residents an update on various town issues, including the township’s recent AAA bond rating, the system with PNC Bank that will allow residents to pay their taxes online using their credit cards, the senior center’s reaccreditation, the Millstone Road repaving, and the township’s roadway upgrades and bike and pedestrian-friendly measures. Specifically, the Meadow Road project (see story page 18) will begin this summer, and the Alexander S-Curve will also be realigned and designed to protect the bicycle-riders and pedestrians using that road, he said.
Hsueh also discussed renovations and expansions to the township’s recreational facilities. He mentioned the dog and skate parks at Community Park, which will be open in time for the spring and summer seasons, and the agreements the town recently made with the West Windsor-Plainsboro Soccer Association, which will make renovations to recreational fields in town in exchange for the association’s use of those fields.
Hsueh also said township officials are also trying to initiate improvements to the 40-acre Duck Pond Park. “Since we’ve got more people moving to the west side of the tracks, we need to have more recreational opportunities there,” Hsueh said.
Michael Kay, who lives off Southfield Road, said he wanted to know a timeline for how long the county would be working on the Old Trenton Road bridge over the Big Bear Brook. Work on the 83-year-old bridge — one of the worst-rated bridges in the state, scoring two points out of 100 on a Federal Highway Administration ranking system — began in February and is expected to take three more months, Hsueh told the residents. County officials previously said work would be finished in June.
Kay expressed concerns over a detour that has been in place during construction, with a section of Old Trenton Road closed. The detour runs along Route 571 to Southfield Road to Village Road, and then back onto Old Trenton Road. The temporary traffic light at the intersection of Southfield and Village roads, as requested by township police, “tends to add more time to the commute” for many nearby residents, and Kay said they were worried it would be permanent, even after construction was completed.
In addition, Kay said most of his neighbors were concerned with the speeding and noise on Southfield Road. The 50-miles-per-hour zone ends at the bridge on Southfield Road, and neighbors are concerned that if “people fly over this bridge at 50 miles per hour, that damage will be done to that bridge, and that will need to be reconstructed in a couple of years,” Kay said.
Hsueh told Kay that the county will not be leaving the traffic signal on the road after the detour is gone and the work is done. He also told Kay that to have speed limits reduced on roads, a whole process has to be initiated by the state DOT, and a study must be commissioned. If the DOT does not find it necessary to lower the speed limit on a particular roadway, there aren’t many other options the township has, Hsueh pointed out.
After the meeting, Kay said that once the traffic light was installed and he was having some concerns about the traffic and commute time, he wanted to see how his neighbors felt, so he went door-to-door asking them.
With regard to redevelopment, Hsueh gave residents an update on the Vaughn Drive connector project funding. He said that even though the state Department of Transportation had dropped $19 million in funding for the project this year, “council is showing there’s willingness to move forward” with redevelopment, so he will keep negotiating with state officials to get the funding back.
State officials told Hsueh in February that their half of the funding for the Vaughn Drive connector project was dropped because a redevelopment plan had not yet been created. Hsueh reported this to the council, which followed with a resolution stating its support of the mayor in his efforts to regain that funding. But Hsueh later received a letter from the state stating that the Vaughn Drive connector project, along with the Route 1 Penns Neck improvement projects, were moved to the unfunded category of the state Fiscal Year 2009-2018 draft, while funding for the Millstone River Bridge Project would remain funded this year.
Residents asked Hsueh about the timeline for seeing redevelopment happen, and wondered how detailed a redevelopment plan needed to be. “Can you estimate when a redevelopment plan will be ready, so we can get back our $19 million,” from the state, asked Coneflower Lane resident Paul Eland.
“I’m hoping that by the end of the fall, we can have something up for public review, and then have a plan adopted by the end of the year,” Hsueh said.
Hsueh also said that the plan must include a clear idea of how many square feet of each type of development, including office and retail, the township wants to see in the redevelopment area.
“Housing is not going to be up to West Windsor,” he said. “It’s going to be up to COAH.” Township consultants John Madden and Gary Davies have shared this opinion with the mayor, as they told council last month that the amount of housing in the plan needed to be sufficient to keep people there night and day in the center of the development, or else it would be dead during off-peak hours. But they also said that the housing density in the redevelopment area was primarily going to be driven by new Council on Affordable Housing rules, which will most likely require the development to include 80 percent market-rate housing and 20 percent affordable.
“I don’t believe the number of housing units will be decided by me or the council,” Hsueh said. But, under redevelopment, the township doesn’t have to have all of the housing units built right away, the mayor said. Rather, it can implement town growth approaches, like phasing the housing in if it turns out there are too many new school children for schools to handle at one time, he said.
Village Grande resident Al Lerner also asked Hsueh what his feelings were on the economy — and the fact that many people across the nation are pointing to a recession — as it relates to West Windsor.
“I feel very optimistic because the train station — if we do that properly — we can use that to draw in businesses,” Hsueh responded.
Residents asked when redevelopment would actually happen.
“If you ask me, I really want to see this done as soon as possible, but we also want to make sure we get consensus from the whole community,” Hsueh said, although he pointed out that officials will never get 100 percent consensus. And, Hsueh said, once the redevelopment plan is done, it’s not set in stone, and changes can be made.
Hsueh also told the residents that since the township hasn’t moved very far with the process since last June, Intercap Holdings CEO Steve Goldin has taken it upon himself to pay his way to reach out to residents. Hsueh said that while he is willing to accept the data that Goldin has providedf, including a traffic study (see story page 13), the township’s own planning consultants immediately began reviewing the data and studies to ensure it was being done correctly. He said township officials want to make informative decisions using a variety of data. He also said he doesn’t want to see the township play “catch-up” if Goldin is reaching out to residents and coming up with plans of his own.
Janet Lerner asked Hsueh how long the process would take once a redevelopment plan is adopted. Hsueh said that even if there was a redevelopment plan done today, just the basic infrastructure alone would take at least a year to construct. “You’ve got to have some basic roadways and parking garages first,” Hsueh said. “In five years, if we can see some sort of skeleton, it would be good.”
