Students discuss consolidation

Community members brought the ongoing debate over municipal consolidation to the University at a panel in Robertson Hall Wednesday evening, with representatives from the joint Borough-Township consolidation committee presenting their endorsement of the consolidation proposal.

If the consolidation referendum passes with a majority in both the Borough and the Township in the Nov. 8 election, the two municipalities would consolidate under a Borough form of government beginning in 2013. The Joint Consolidation/Shared Services Study Commission compiled a plan for consolidation over the past year.

The two municipalities currently administer many of their services, such as public schools and civic planning, jointly. The commission says that, by consolidating their remaining services, they could potentially save $3.1 million.

“The Princetons have been kind of the poster children of doing shared services, and we’ve reached what is now a tipping point where we only have two major ones outstanding,” said Township Mayor Chad Goerner, who was also a member of the commission. “I feel that consolidation is really that next step.”

In particular, a consolidated police force would slightly reduce the total headcount of officers and would create a new community policing division.

One undergraduate student who attended the panel expressed his concerns over the existing University-town relations regarding the police forces.

“I find the police force here a little, maybe, overbearing,” he said. “It seems like they’re ample enough.”

Anton Lahnston, who chaired the consolidation committee, said he was unsure how consolidating the police forces would affect police relations with the University.

“There is a constant question about how to best work Prospect [Avenue], and I don’t know what they’re going to do,” Lahnston said. “If the police consolidate, then one of the important components of consolidation is a new relationship with the police on campus.”

Kristen Appelget, community relations spokeswoman for the University, mentioned the inconveniences that currently arise for students due to the split nature of the two Princetons, specifically voting issues.

“It’s very inconvenient to the extent that our students want to participate in the democratic process,” Appelget said. “Even if they just move across the hall in certain dorms — Butler [College] and Whitman [College], for example — they can move from the Borough to the Township [and need to change their voter registration].”

A consolidated municipality would make it easier to approve municipal projects that span the Borough and Township, Borough Councilman Roger Martindell said. Such increased ease could potentially aid the University’s agenda, particularly the ongoing zoning strife over its proposed Arts and Transit Neighborhood.

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Martindell cited a case with similar details to those of the ongoing arts struggle, in which the University is requesting zoning changes along the Alexander corridor near Forbes College.

“If you want to accomplish a project that spans a community and that brings in resources from the University, be it $300 million or something less,” he said — making a thinly veiled reference to the University’s proposed development, worth the same sum — “then it helps to have conversation that is a bigger conversation, that can weigh it more on its merits community-wide in the broader sense than just every neighborhood being able to veto what the next guy’s going to do.”

“Then it gets to be something like the Middle East,” he said.

The municipal divide encourages the two municipalities to take opposite stances, Martindell added. “We can’t say yes because we’re different, so we say no. And we say no, and we say no and we say no. And government gets paralyzed.”

The Township Committee has expressed support for the University’s plan over the past few months, while the Borough Council has consistently and unanimously expressed opposition.

Commission member Patrick Simon addressed the Arts and Transit zoning request in more certain terms.

“The development happens to be just across the line, so the Borough doesn’t get as much benefit financially [as the Township],” Simon explained. “That is really an issue that would go away.”

“There are really pocket communities with very distinctive identities with very distinctive identities. I think that’s true of the Township, but it’s especially true of the Borough,” Borough resident and audience member Jane Sharp said.

The Borough and Township separated in 1896, Simon explained. For some years prior to 1896, the Borough existed as a semi-autonomous entity within the Township.

According to folk legend, the two municipalities split due to differences in the school calendar at a time when the Borough was largely urbanized and the Township was largely agricultural.