Council hopefuls discuss issues

Candidates for this November’s Borough Council election discussed consolidation and town-gown relations at a public debate on Tuesday evening. Most of the candidates opposed the University’s plan to move the Dinky station and supported requests that the University increase its annual contribution to the Borough.

Barbara Trelstad, a sitting Council member, and Heather Howard, a Wilson School lecturer, are running as Democratic candidates. The Republican candidates are Peter Marks and Dudley Sipprelle, the father of Scott Sipprelle, the 2010 Republican candidate for Congress from the district.

Candidates also discussed the consolidation referendum that is up for consideration in the November election. If passed with a majority in both the Borough and Township, the referendum would merge the two municipalities into a single municipality beginning in 2013.

“We are 30,000 people on a planet that has currently about 7 billion people on it. We must work together, and I think that consolidation is one of the easiest and best ways for us to do that,” Trelstad said. “I think the $3.2 million that is proposed to be saved is very conservative. I think as we move forward and work together we can save even more, being more efficient.”

Howard also expressed support for consolidation and said she didn’t believe it would disenfranchise the voice of the downtown.

“Studies have shown that about 60 percent of people in what would be the combined municipality would live within walking distance of downtown, so I think there would be more people who care about downtown if we join,” Howard said. “It allows us a chance to unite neighborhoods which are currently divided.”

Marks predicted, however, that Borough and Township voters would disagree over the necessity of new downtown parking areas. Because Township residents live further away, Marks said, they need to drive downtown and their inclusion in the municipality would require that additional parking be built in the downtown area.

“It seems to me that the likely ramification of consolidation is that structured parking, justified by higher population densities and height restrictions, crowd out single-family neighborhoods, so you displace one of the defining characters of our town,” Marks said.

“I think we could have done better, and so I cannot endorse consolidation in the form in which it has been presented,” Sipprelle said, referring to the plan prepared by the consolidation study commission over the past year. He took issue with the consolidation study commission’s decision to consolidate under the Borough form of government because it would not allow the municipality to elect its councilmen through neighborhood wards, he said.

The University made a $1.2 million contribution to the Borough’s 2011 operating budget as part of an agreement that expires this year, and all the candidates except Sipprelle said the Borough should seek to negotiate a larger contribution from the University.

“There have been some studies by the Lincoln Institute that suggest that they could pay perhaps about 25 percent of their assessed land value, which would be a payment of approximately $5 million,” Trelstad said.

Trelstad also suggested forming a new town-gown relations committee, including both Council members and ordinary citizens, and requiring the University to maintain its own fire department.

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“If they were to have to build their own fire department on the campus, that would cost them a significant amount of money to build, maintain and run,” she said.

“The University certainly has a moral obligation to the community, and the payment ought to reflect what their true burden is to the community,” Howard added, noting that the University and town would benefit from ensuring each other’s strength.

“[The current financial contribution is] a rounding error in the context of their budget and their endowment, or even the interest on their endowment,” Marks said of the University’s current contribution. “I find the behavior of this present administration to be offensive to the point of obscene. It’s just arrogant. It needs to be stopped and the University needs to be reined in,” he added, referring as well to the University’s proposed plan to move the Dinky station southward to build its proposed Arts and Transit Neighborhood in the Alexander corridor.

“They don’t have to pay one red cent because they’re exempted by law,” Sipprelle said. “In the Borough, unfortunately, the University has become a punching bag.” He pointed out that the University contributes funds to the Borough’s emergency management and fire department and to maintain certain public roads. “We’ve got to have a positive, not a dysfunctional, relationship with the University,” Sipprelle added.

Candidates also responded to a question about how to promote the success of local businesses in the downtown area.

“I think we can support local business by shopping there,” Trelstad said. She explained how she shops downtown instead of driving to an out-of-town mall and encouraged others to do the same.

Howard predicted that the University’s proposed Arts and Transit Neighborhood and the Dinky move would hurt business in the current downtown.

“The proposed redevelopment of lower Alexander has the real potential to cannibalize downtown, and that’s something we ought to be very sensitive to,” Howard said. “It’s universally acknowledged that, from a planning perspective, you want to have mass transit be near downtowns and near populations centers, and so we ought not to be thinking about moving the Dinky further away.”

Marks said that Borough regulations made the cost of entry into local business too high and that failing to address this problem would cause the Borough to lose its unique character as a small town with a vibrant shopping district.

“The transformation is frighteningly fast into a typical city where we have largely apartments and multi-family dwellings supplanting the current single-family neighborhoods,” Marks said, predicting that the Borough might soon see “the kinds of strip centers that characterize most other similar communities, and I think that would be a tragedy.”

Sipprelle suggested forming a Borough committee to represent the concerns of downtown businessmen.

“Something has to be done about traffic in Princeton Borough,” he said. “I’m for going back and pressing on the state Department of Transportation to add the Borough to a list of communities with restrictions on truck traffic.”