At his town hall meeting on August 16, Mayor Hsueh dusted off the old subject of how much West Windsor had spent on redevelopment in the train station area. I decided to check his figures. My primary sources for expenses from 2006 onward are a chart compiled by former township administrator Bob Hary dated April 30, 2011, and an outwardly similar chart presented by the mayor, with other references as mentioned below. The results may surprise many people.
Besides the date separation, the Hary and Hseuh charts differ in several key respects. For example, the mayor didn’t include any of the $116,421.94 litigation expenses that were itemized by Hary. I discuss the separate “redevelopment fee” issue below.
The town incurred additional expenses that could not have been included by Hary (and again were not mentioned by Hsueh) during the spring and summer of 2011. At the August 1, 2011, business meeting, then-councilwoman Diane Ciccone stated that the total litigation expenses up until then were $153,000. The additional amount over Hary’s figure was for preparation work and attendance by attorneys Gerald Muller and the senior Mike Herbert at court hearings before Judge Feinberg in Trenton in mid-2011, and there were other expenses for their follow-up work until the final enabling ordinances were adopted on September 19. I and council members George Borek and Linda Geevers went to the court hearings.
At the September 17 special work session just preceding the crucial final vote on September 19, Ciconne mentioned that Transit Village expenses for 2004 and 2005 had never been reported, expenses that did not appear on either the Hary or Hsueh charts. Then-Council President Kamal Khanna asked the administration to supply consultant and Planning Board costs for those years and tie them into the financial statements, but this apparently never happened.
The mayor also said at his town hall meeting that the town had already received a $683,000 “redevelopment fee” from InterCap. There are two things wrong with this. First, no such fee was ever received (Pat Ward’s letter, the News, August 22). Second, even if we were to receive it, it would have to be used to help pay for 25 separate off-site road improvements that InterCap or its developer could then avoid paying for directly if its project were ever to be built.
Traffic consultant Gary Davies itemized these improvements in a memo dated October 19, 2010, that updated his earlier one of September 22. The October memo incorporated the correct number of dwellings (800) and square feet of retail (70,000) into “Scenario 2A.” Independent traffic consultant Nick Verderese’s February 21, 2011, report to Planning Board Chairman Marvin Gardner mentioned the difference between these memos as a “discrepancy” that should be discussed. Apparently it never was.
Geevers later brought up this hypothetical reimbursement at the council meeting of July 11, 2011. She pointed out that the township engineer had already estimated that the total cost of improvements associated with this project would be $3.3 million. As quoted in the July 22, 2011, News, she said: “We are not getting any extra funds we wouldn’t already be guaranteed to receive.”
Council, tired of all the controversy and lawsuits, had authorized the InterCap settlement after midnight during the November 22-23, 2010, meeting. Though realizing that “fairness hearings” were still to come in 2011, little did they know then how complicated it was going to be.
On September 18, 2011, in an E-mail to Planning Board attorney Muller the day before the final vote on the ordinances, I made a last-minute effort to rationalize the splitting of Gary Davies’ October 19, 2010, off-tract road assessment to InterCap of $3,361,090 (“Scenario 2A” above) into the outdated September 22, 2010, road assessment of $2,678,090 and the so-called “redevelopment fee” of $683,000. I had asked for a response before the September 19 meeting so that I could comment on it at the hearing, but nothing came back. I sent copies of this E-mail to all council members, as well as Hary and township clerk Sharon Young, to ensure that it would become a public record.
The upshot is that despite what the mayor said on August 16, these funds, even if received, would end up being a pass-through and therefore could not be counted as a partial reimbursement of the town’s sunk expenses.
Let’s summarize the net expenses as the mayor reported them and my own result, after taking credit for grants and other reimbursements as detailed in the Hary and Hsueh charts. The mayor, after neglecting the above litigation expenses and taking credit for the phantom “redevelopment fee,” arrived at a net gain to the town of $13,021.49. My figure is a net loss of $817,730.42, not even counting follow-up work by our attorneys after Ciccone’s Aug. 1 estimate, nor the unknown 2004 and 2005 expenses that President Khanna requested but never received, nor the extra $36,290 the town is spending for the flood study on InterCap’s behalf, nor all the soft costs associated with council and staff time, to say nothing of the public’s.
All this may be moot anyway because the project will likely never happen. There are no funds to construct the required $40 million Vaughn Drive connection and there are still unanswered questions about a second Dinky crossing as well as increased traffic, environmental, and tax impacts. My point is that when people present hard numbers in public, they should check their figures ahead of time.
John A. Church
West Windsor
