In his first town hall meeting of the year, Mayor Shing-Fu Hsueh emphasized his long-term stance that a comprehensive plan for the 350-acre Princeton Junction train station redevelopment area is a crucial part of solving the parking and traffic concerns there.##M:[more]##
In addition, he called for all township entities to work together to make sure “we do it right.” The first part to ensuring the project is successful, he said, involves the need for township officials and residents to trust experts to provide correct information. He pointed to the Hillier schemes and Intercap CEO Steve Goldin, who has commissioned a traffic impact study using his own money.
“Why not just take all of this technical information?” he said during the meeting held on January 24. “You don’t have to agree with (Hillier’s) analysis, but you should be able to trust data, and you should be able to work with them to review their work step-by-step, and this will save taxpayers a lot of money.”
“There’s no such thing as 1,”000 homes; there’s no such thing as a final conclusion,” he added. “All we have is all of this information waiting for us to tell our consultants, `This is what we want. This is what we don’t want, and this is the scale we need, and this is the scale we don’t need.’”
Hsueh said the Township Council canceled the June 4 follow-up meeting with Hillier, never giving township officials the chance to direct Hillier in such a way. He did say he remained very optimistic about redevelopment, especially now that the council seems to agree with using the data from Goldin’s study, but having its own professionals review it, and he said Hillier needed to be brought back to the table. Council plans to do this in April, after township professionals finish their reviews.
He also said he was upset that the council was considering a resolution designating itself as the redevelopment entity, in which it would set out the different authorities and responsibilities of both itself and the administration. “You cannot separate responsibility from the authority,” he said. “We’ve got to work together.”
“I think it’s important we do it right, not only socially, economically, and not only for the design,” he said. “We want to make sure 20 to 30 years from now, our future generations will say, `They did the right job.’”
One woman asked the mayor when parking would be resolved at the train station. “Twenty to thirty years down the line is really not good enough,” she said. “It needs to happen now.”
Hsueh pointed out that it costs only $33 a month for parking at the station, one of the cheapest prices in the state. If West Windsor residents wanted a new parking garage, the only way to do so without raising the costs as much as $200 a month is to work with nearby business owners, he said. And the only way to do that was through a comprehensive plan in which businesses are given incentives. In turn, they would contribute money for building a parking garage.
“Without a comprehensive redevelopment plan, how am I going to be able to negotiate with businesses for them to contribute because they have no idea what they were going to get out of this,” he said. “If they’re not going to get any more than what they’re allowed to do today, then why are they going to contribute anything?”
Another resident, Joyce Shin, asked a series of questions about why the redevelopment plan had to be so comprehensive. Instead, she asked why the township couldn’t just create a plan covering parking and traffic. “The political pressure its toward traffic and parking – that seems to be what’s holding it up,” she said. “Can’t you do a plan that is primarily to solve those problems in the context of what Hillier has done?”
In response, another resident, Jim Moeller said: “Parking isn’t pretty. You’re talking about a lot of money. You’re also talking about which land (do we place it on)? If it was really simple, it would have been done. What’s clear, it seems to me, is that you have to have new business people coming into this community in order to pay for this parking.”
Andy Bromberg, another resident, said in order to take care of the priority areas, “we need the 350-acre redevelopment process to look at the big picture. There’s no other way to do it because no one’s going to fund it; no one’s going to pay for it.”
One woman also asked the mayor about the condition of the roadway on Route 571 near the Rite Aid site. The mayor said the state approved $3 million in funding to the county to fix the area, but the township and county couldn’t come to an agreement on how many lanes the road should have, among other details. They money remained there until the late 1990s, when the state realized it wasn’t being used and took it back. Now, he said, an agreement has been worked out between the two entities about how to proceed with improvement, but the money is no longer there. “I’m happy to tell you we basically got all of this resolved. The only thing here is: where is the money?” he said. “Of course, if we have a redevelopment plan, that will make it a little bit faster because then the state will elevate the priority.”
