Consolidation debate heats up at meeting

Local residents from the Princeton Borough and Princeton Township discussed the merits of the proposed municipal consolidation at a joint meeting of the Borough Council and Township Committee at a meeting Tuesday evening.

If the consolidation referendum passes with a majority in both the Borough and the Township, the two will become one municipality beginning in 2013. They would be consolidated according to a plan proposed by the Joint Consolidation/Shared Services Study Commission, which compiled its proposal over the past year.

Some of those opposing consolidation said they feared that a consolidated Princeton would not make the staffing and spending cuts necessary to achieve the savings predicted and that the consolidated municipality would only have higher expenses than the two current municipalities.

The Borough currently conducts public garbage collection, while the Township does not. A combined Princeton would incur a new expense by extending garbage collection service to the entire municipality.

“The savings are hypothetical, while the added cost of extending trash collection into the Township is certain,” Borough resident Alexi Assmus said.

Councilman David Goldfarb has opposed consolidation since early summer on the grounds that the figure for the projected property tax savings for the average household is unreliable. County equalization rates that change from year to year will cause the property taxes to vary in unpredictable ways.

Several members of the public raised concerns that leaf and brush collection schedules would also have to be adjusted in a combined municipality.

Presently, the Borough collects leaves about 40 times per year, while the Township conducts it only six times per year. Under consolidation, Assmus said, the municipality would reduce all leaf collection to the current level practiced in the Township rather than incur the prohibitive cost of conducting leaf collection throughout the combined municipality as frequently as the Borough currently does. As a result, she said, Borough residents would see a reduction in their leaf collection service.

However, Goldfarb explained that different frequencies of collection would occur in each region.

“There will be differing levels of service within the municipality,” he said.

In a consolidated Princeton, he explained, the downtown area and its immediate surroundings (which are largely composed of what is currently the Borough) would maintain a much more frequent leaf collection than other parts of town.

“That’s called discrimination. And it’s illegal,” said Kent Fields, a Borough resident who lives on Linden Lane, an area that Goldfarb, in response to Fields’ question, said probably lay outside the area that would be identified as the downtown.

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Township Mayor Chad Goerner replied that in the combined municipality each neighborhood would have its own advisory planning committee that could petition the governing body and the planning board with requests and complaints about services like leaf collection.

“That’s community relations, please. I just want my leaves collected after consolidation,” Fields said.

Kate Warren, the leader of the community group Preserve Our Historic Borough, said she found the community leaders’ manner during the duration of the consolidation debate arrogant.

She said she resented the commission members’ manner of addressing the community on the issue. “You know what’s best for us, and we should blindly sign on the dotted line. Some of us prefer to think for ourselves,” Warren said of the commission’s response to criticism.

The study commission “worked backward,” she said, to reach its predetermined conclusion that the communities ought to consolidate. She called the estimated figure of $3.2 million in yearly savings “flawed” and said that the commission reached it by non-objective methods.

“Rather than issue a correction [to the figure for predicted savings], the commission holds it steadfast and continues to promise voters that there will be such savings in the likelihood that the new government carries through with 100 percent of the recommendations,” Warren said.

“If in 1894 we had not decided to separate the Borough and the Township, can anyone think of a single, viable reason why would we consider such a proposition today?” Borough resident Dan Liams asked.

Rather than blame the new government for not achieving its predicted savings, residents who were skeptical of the predicted savings should take it upon themselves to hold the new government accountable, he said. “We will be the ones who will elect the officials. We will be the ones who will hold those elected officials accountable,” he explained.

Several people who spoke against consolidation believed that consolidation would weaken the community’s position in negotiations with the University.

“The University’s expansion and ambitions are not without consequence, and they need to be slowed, and they need to be studied,” Borough resident Peter Marks said. Marks is a Republican candidate for the Borough Council in this November’s election.

He praised the Borough Council for negotiating with the University more aggressively than the Township Committee over the Arts and Transit Neighborhood zoning over the past year. Calling out by name four of the councilmen most outspoken against the zoning, he said, “I cannot make sense of those four positions [toward the Arts and Transit Neighborhood] with your varying degrees of support for consolidation,” saying that the University would have more leeway to do as it wished without having to get the approval of two governing bodies.

“I’m afraid when this consolidation comes up, it’s going to create one-stop shopping for Princeton University,” Borough resident Jim Firestone said, echoing Marks’ concerns. He praised the Borough for its persistence in negotiations with what he called “the 800-pound gorilla across the street” over the past year.

Many Borough residents have expressed opposition to consolidation, saying that they will be outvoted by Township voters because Township voters outnumber Borough voters two to one. Dan Preston, president of the Princeton Community Democratic Organization, said that Borough interests would not lose representation because Township and Borough voters are so similar in their voting habits.

In the 2010 election, Preston said, 73 percent of Township voters and 78 percent of Borough voters voted for Rush Holt for congress. Because registration rates in the Borough and Township are nearly the same, Borough and Township residents share the same fundamental values and would agree on most issues, he added.

At the close of the meeting, every member of the Borough Council and Township Committee, except for Goldfarb, expressed support for consolidation in turn. Goldfarb, who served on the finance subcommittee in the consolidation study commission, is the only member of the governing bodies and the only member of the consolidation study commission who opposes consolidation.