Citizens protest for granite sidewalks

“We need redress,” Claire Jacobus, a Cleveland Lane resident, said of the sidewalk issue. “We are asking you as citizens of the community to bring this back to the table.”

Jacobus and about a dozen of her neighbors descended on Borough Hall to protest the installation of cement rather than granite curbs in the Cleveland Lane neighborhood.

In a dramatic move, Jacobus implored everyone who supported her to stand. All her neighbors from Cleveland Lane in attendance rose from their seats and stood in protest for about half a minute.

The granite curbs will cost nearly $100,000 more than the cement ones, Borough Engineer Christopher Budzinski said.

Councilman David Goldfarb noted that the pro-granite group was only a subset of Cleveland Lane residents and that many others would be satisfied with standard cement curbs.

“I’m asking you to bring the people who didn’t want granite curbs to the meeting next time,” he said. “You are going to force the people who didn’t want granite curbs to pay for them.”

Borough resident Mark Alexandridis, who ran unsuccessfully for a Borough Council seat in 2003, also addressed the council to demand that information pertaining to the Borough’s negotiations with the developer, Nassau HKT, be made public.

Nassau HKT was slated to develop a building on the parking lot behind the Princeton Record Exchange, but its negotiations with the Borough have broken down over the past year. The Borough has kept discussion of the offers it made to the developer secret.

“I think it’s time for a public session on this; I think we are owed some guidance on where this is going because every day that this goes on is costing the taxpayers,” Alexandridis said.

“I’d like to see some financials on the project because we haven’t seen those in over a year,” he added. “There is a preponderance of evidence that this is going nowhere.”

Councilman Roger Martindell concurred with Alexandridis. “He and the rest of the public don’t want to address this in a crash course when all of the documents are presented for final approval,” he said.

Martindell has been demanding a release of the facts since last fall, but the other council members have refused to release the information. No resolution of the issue was reached at last night’s meeting.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

After a fierce debate, the council also did not pass a resolution allowing a telecommunications company, 4Connections, LLC, to install additional cables on telephone poles. Council members complained that there are already too many wires on the telephone poles and doubted that 4Connections would actually use the wires it set up.

“4Connetions is a ‘dark fiber’ provider in that their only business is stringing up the cable as a conduit that someone could plug into,” Councilman Andrew Koontz said. “Verizon, for example, is not a ‘dark fiber’ provider in that people can plug into it.”

“There’s so much fiber-optic capacity along Nassau Street that there is no way all of that is going to be used in the lives of our children and grandchildren,” Goldfarb added.