With the election a little more than a month away, the three candidates for West Windsor mayor have taken different approaches to campaigning.##M:[more]##
Incumbent mayor Shing-Fu Hsueh has turned to writing, while Council President Charles Morgan has designed an essay contest, and community activist Pete Weale is vowing against placing signs around the township stating he is running for office, and is urging his opponents to do the same.
Shing-Fu Hsueh. Upon signing the redevelopment plan ordinance into law, the mayor clarified his stance on redevelopment in a position paper. Among the points he made:
What My Support of Redevelopment Means:
• Township controlled and managed growth within West Windsor.
• Redevelopment will not be turned over to developers who would decide the township’s future.
• Additional parking at the train station for West Windsor residents.
• Design that complements existing neighborhoods and creates a vibrant town center for all residents and visitors to West Windsor.
• Opportunity to negotiate with the state and county agencies for financial support and commitments to traffic improvements.
• Redevelopment will not be paid for by the taxpayer, and with mayor’s veto power, I will not approve any project that places additional financial burden on our residents.
What My Support of Redevelopment Does Not Mean:
• Excessive housing beyond the units required and defined by the Plan.
• Support or endorsement from me for any specific developer or plan, seen or unseen.
• Someone will put a shovel in the ground without going through a thorough open review of the site specific analyses including social, financial and environmental impact assessments.
• State controlled redevelopment.
• Meetings behind closed doors with developers or private interest groups.
I urge all residents to get the correct information on redevelopment before drawing conclusions. Do not be misled by scare tactics claiming West Windsor will be turned into an urban nightmare designed by bureaucrats and regional commuters.
This is a positive first step for improving parking, traffic and circulation problems while creating for the township, a true “center” and sense of community. I look forward to working with township council to make these improvements a reality.
Charles Morgan, on the other hand, is encourage his constituents to do the writing. He and his running mates are trying to engage residents by holding an essay contest in which participants highlight the qualities they think the mayor of West Windsor should possess.
The essay contest has two categories — one for residents ages 18 and under, and another for adults, ages 19 and older. The essay theme is “Characteristics of a Great West Windsor Mayor.”
The winner in each category will receive four suite tickets to a Trenton Thunder game of his or her choice, among several dates, and will have their essays published on the slate’s website — www.best4westwindsor.com. Essay winners will be selected by a panel of three former West Windsor mayors: Mike Mastro, Steve Decter, and Carole Carson. Participants will be notified no later than Tuesday, May 5.
Essays should be no more than 800 words, typed, and double spaced. Essays will be judged on originality and writing style. Applicants should include their name, age (only if in the student category), addresses, phone numbers, and E-mail addresses when sending their entries to Contests@Best4WestWindsor.com or mailing them to Box 211, West Windsor 08550.
Applicants who are under 16 years of age must have their parents’ consent to enter the contest and in the event that anyone 16 or younger is a winner, a parent will receive the tickets to present to their child.
The Best 4 West Windsor Slate — made up of Morgan and council candidates Nitin Shah and Anupam Gupta — also announced separate contest which will draw residents to the slate’s website for a Hidden Word Search.
The contest involves finding five words “hidden” within the text of the www.Best4WestWindsor.com site. The catch is that the words will be found spelled backwards within another word. For example, if one hidden word is “raw,” that word can be found in the word “backwards.” The hidden words are: gel, red, cart, mall, and dual.
Morgan explained that it took a lot of work for he and his running mates to create the word search without making it too easy for people to “simply copy and paste into a Microsoft Word document and do a word search,” but they also did not want to make it too difficult.
The first five persons to E-mail the specific location of the five words to Contests@Best4WestWindsor.com will receive four tickets each to a Trenton Thunder game of their choice from several dates. There is no age category to enter this contest.
The entry deadline for both contests is April 22, 2009. Some restrictions apply on entries. For full contest rules, see www.Best4WestWindsor.com/contests.
Morgan says he hopes to get residents, especially younger people, engaged and “paying attention to the political process, and maybe paying attention to some of the issues.”
The purpose of the word contest is also to get people to read the slate’s website, and “that way, they’ll learn what we’re saying and maybe to get some thinking going about the issues.” The essay contest also will give the candidates a better view of “what the community wants, and to ask the community what it thinks,” says Morgan.
Morgan said his team wanted to have an odd number of judges, and also wanted to ensure that he was being fair. “This is a nonpartisan town, but partisan politics are alive and well behind the scenes,” he said. “I knew people would be paying attention to the political affiliations.” So, he selected one Republican and two Democrats as judges to “remove any suggestion that I am being partisan towards the Republican side of the aisle.”
Decter is the campaign treasurer for Hsueh, but Morgan says he thought it was great to have him as a judge. “That means we’ve got a high likelihood that the judging will be even-handed,” he said, adding he is trying to keep the campaigning out of the essay contest and “make it as objective as to what really makes a good mayor, and not toward any of the people running.”
The only way that could happen, he says, is if someone wrote an essay that leaned toward one of the candidates, but he is inclined to believe that Mastro and Decter would lean more toward supporting Hsueh than him, so “that’s against me if that happens.”
“I’ve known all three of these people for a long time,” he said. “I think as judges, they will step back from the current politics and stand above the fray and doing an honest job of judging. A lot of thought went into picking the judges, and making sure it was potentially exciting around what we might hear.”
Decter says he agreed to give his input as a former mayor, and not as a the treasurer of the West Windsor First campaign. He said he didn’t want to be part of a campaign event for Morgan, but said he could indicate his thoughts. “He didn’t send me a follow-up on that, so I wasn’t sure how it would be conducted, but I would be glad to give some thoughts if it were done discreetly.”
“Whether any of us can indicate what a great mayor would look like” is tough to say, Decter said. “Everybody was here under different circumstances, and I was certainly there under a different type of government. I’ve observed in the past how mayors have conducted themselves.”
Pete Weale. Mayoral candidate Pete Weale has called upon his opponents and candidates running for Township Council to agree to a moratorium on all roadside election signs for the duration of this campaign season.
Weale, who has strongly advocated the removal of illegal roadway signs around the township, has said he himself will not “despoil” the appearance of the community by “populating the roadsides with this material.” Political signs are, however, legally permitted, as the township’s ordinance does not prohibit them for constitutional reasons. While Weale acknowledges this, he says that “the visual and environmental impacts should outweigh the candidates’ needs to advertise their names.”
“Political signs have limited value,” said Weale. “They create and compound the proliferation of roadside trash.”
Weale said that he “should be the one toilet papering the town for name recognition” given Mayor Shing-Fu Hsueh’s 17 years of political experience in the township, and Council President Charles Morgan’s 10 years.
Weale says he had sent an e-mail to each of the candidates running in this year’s election, but has not received a response from any of them. “political signs seem to be an ego-driven expense of dubious value,” he says. “Let’s shelve the visual rhetoric of a traditional political campaign by changing the paradigm for responsible spending.” Instead, Weale is calling on his opponents to take their budgeted sign money and donate it to the Community Garden at the Censoni tract across from the municipal building.
Steve Decter, the treasurer for Hsueh’s campaign, says that putting up signs is an expensive thing to do, and that he is aware Weale has been rallying against sign clutter for a long time, but “I think it’s a very important part of a campaign to have people to see signs.”
“Its’ hard enough to get people to vote in the May election without some sort of reminder of the event to occur,” Decter said “I think it’s useful for the various campaigns, who have to take the signs downs as quickly as possible after the election.”
“I agree with Pete about the sign clutter, and I think the town has taken some measure to try to restrict the amount of sign, but I think freedom of speech is one of the fundamental principles of political campaigns, and I think it’s a form of speech,” Decter added.
