University neutral on consolidation

Unbeknownst to many University students, the campus lies across two municipalities: Princeton Borough and Princeton Township. On Nov. 8, residents of both municipalities will vote on whether to consolidate the Borough and the Township into one municipality.

If the referendum passes with a majority in both the Borough and the Township, the two towns will become one municipality beginning in 2013.

Over the past year, an ad hoc commission prepared a plan for consolidation that would merge all municipal departments to achieve potential annual savings predicted at $3.1 million.

Town-Gown Relations

The University administration has no position on consolidation. “However the community wants to organize itself, we’ll work with it as effectively as we can,” University Vice President and Secretary Robert Durkee ’69 said.

The merger would have little effect on most of the University’s routine community negotiations because “most issues either are one part of town or the other,” Durkee explained. Most of the University’s construction projects only go before the community planning board, which is already a jointly administered entity.

A development requiring a zoning change is an exception, and a project requiring zoning in both municipalities requires even more steps. “If you’re trying to put zoning in place for a project that spans the two municipalities, it’s just complicated to have two sets of conversations,” he said.

Over the past year, the University has been seeking zoning changes to build a development of arts-related buildings in the Alexander corridor near Forbes College. Because the development would straddle the Borough-Township boundary, it requires zoning approval from both governing bodies.

The proposed plan for the Arts and Transit neighborhood involves moving the Dinky station 464 feet southward and moving it from the Borough to the Township. Elected officials, particularly in the Borough, have vocally opposed the zoning because of the move of the station.

Campaign literature distributed by the pro-consolidation citizens’ group Unite Princeton advertises that a consolidated municipality would have “a stronger voice dealing with Princeton University and other third parties” such as state agencies.

The merger would allow the community to speak with a single, more powerful voice, Unite Princeton co-chair Peter Wolanin ’94 explained.

“It protects us from a divide-and-conquer strategy,” Wolanin said, under which the University could take advantage of the community’s diffused authority. Under the current two-municipality system, he added, “it’s hard for us to maintain a single negotiating position for the community.”

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“I suspect the University would be greatly relieved to have a single partner to negotiate with. Currently they have to go basically to two sets of municipal meetings,” Wolanin added.

Township Mayor Chad Goerner echoed Wolanin’s concern that the University is currently able to manipulate the municipalities against each other.

“That’s what can happen when we are two separate municipalities. The University can play one municipality against the other,” Goerner said. When asked if the University has done this in recent memory, Goerner said he didn’t know of any instances.

“I don’t have any specific examples,” Goerner said, “but I’m just basing it on theory. Essentially, it’s easy to appease one municipality and gain public relations from appeasing it without addressing the other.”

The Arts and Transit Neighborhood is one project that would affect the Borough and Township differently, and that has elicited different reactions from the two governments.

If the neighborhood were constructed according to the University’s plan, the Borough would lose a few properties from its tax rolls including the Wawa, some parking revenues and the Dinky station. The Township, on the other hand, would gain the station, the parking and a few taxable properties.

Nearly all Township elected officials have expressed support for the University’s Arts and Transit Neighborhood plan. By contrast, all members of the Borough Council unanimously voted to have a resolution against the plan delivered to University officials and trustees.

University Contribution

Last year, the University made voluntary contributions of $1.2 million to the Borough’s operating budget and $500,000 to the Township’s operating budget. For the past six years, the University has had an agreement to make increasing contributions to the Borough. Last year was the first time the University made a contribution to the Township.

In January, President Shirley Tilghman said at a particularly antagonistic Borough Council meeting on the Arts and Transit zoning that the University’s future contribution depended on whether the University felt that the community was cooperating with its goals. Since then, Borough and Township officials have been fearful that the University may reduce or eliminate its contribution as backlash for resistance to the zoning.

“In a larger municipality with a single negotiating unit, we would be able to better absorb that impact and we could not be threatened by it,” Goerner said of the possibility of losing the annual contributions.

“If [the contribution] were to be eliminated [in the present state of affairs], it would be very detrimental to the Borough’s budget base,” he added. “If we were a consolidated municipality, we would have a much larger budget, and because of that we would be able to negotiate from a position of strength rather than a position of weakness.”

Durkee has stated publicly that the University doesn’t intend to withdraw its contribution to either municipality entirely, but would consider reducing the amount if its finds the community is unsupportive of its goals.

In the case of consolidation, Durkee said, he would consider making only year-by-year agreements for the first few years of the merged government until he is familiar with the new officials and has experience working with the new government.

“It depends on who’s elected and what their priorities are,” Durkee said, noting that there were certain people in the local governments who had not been interested in forming a good working relationship with the University in recent years. “At the beginning there won’t be much of a track record. We won’t have a lot of experience with that municipality, and that could affect the duration of the agreement,” he added.

Balance of Power

Borough residents opposed to consolidation cite their fear that a loss of a distinct Borough voice and character would come from a consolidated municipality.

The Borough, containing the downtown center of Princeton, has a more pedestrian lifestyle, while Township residents, by and large, drive more regularly and have fewer shopping areas within walking distance.

The Township has a population of 17,000, while the Borough has a population of 13,000. The Township includes roughly 2,000 undergraduates, while the Borough includes roughly 5,000, according to census figures cited by Goerner.

If the municipalities consolidate, residents who lived in the former Borough could be outvoted by residents who lived in the former Township. Pro-Borough advocates fear that new developments will be placed in Township areas only accessible by car and that pedestrian interests will not be prioritized.

Because undergraduates primarily live in the Borough and spend most of their time in the pedestrian downtown area, a decline in walking-accessible locations would acutely impact them.

“People who live in the center of town and walk frequently, like University students, will suffer from a decline in walkability in their town if we consolidate,” Alexi Assmus, a member of the pro-Borough citizens group Preserve Our Historic Borough, said in an email.

University students would also have much less power as a voting bloc in the consolidated municipality than they have in the current Borough, Kate Warren of POHB explained in an email.

“Currently, undergraduates make up about 40 percent of the Borough population; in a consolidated Princeton students will make up approximately 17 percent of the population,” Warren said.

“Students and residents alike lose the ability to control the immediate environment, the campus and the central business district — the ‘town center’ — when, as a result of consolidation, guaranteed representation on the zoning board disappears.”

The Joint Consolidation/Shared Services Study Commission chose to recommend that the consolidated community be formed under a Borough form of government, which would not permit a local ward system of representation.

Under a ward system, the municipality would be divided into six wards, and one councilman would be elected from each of the wards. The commission decided against the ward system because one of these wards would have been almost entirely composed of University students, as a commission member stated publicly months ago, and they thought the system might be unfair for the community.

“One of those voting districts would surely have had a majority of students living in it,” POHB member Kenneth Fields said in an email. “Undergraduate students, who would probably be motivated to vote if one of their own was going to serve on town council, yes? Which would have been a breath of fresh air. And entirely reasonable: ‘Students are transients who are only here for four years. They have no stake in the future of our town...’ Nonsense — there will always be students here, the ones here now representing the ones who will be here in the future.”

Voting in One Municipality

The Borough-Township boundary crosses through the main campus, meaning that some undergraduates qualify as Borough residents and others are Township residents. Because the line bisects Forbes College, South Baker Hall, Yoseloff Hall and Wilf Hall, students on one side of these dormitories must vote in the Borough while those on the other side vote in the Township.

“It’s a big issue for hundreds of Princeton students that they’re not in a clear district,” Princeton College Democrats president Jarrah O’Neill ’13 said. In a few rooms that the boundary bisects, she said, “if you put your bed on one side of the dorm room, then you’re in the Township, and if you put your bed on the other side, you’re in the Borough, and you can never know that. It’s random.”

Confusion over how to register in the correct municipality, and which of the four polling places within the University’s campus to visit, has made elections messy and inconvenient for students in past years.

“If a student lives in the same voting district all four years, he typically won’t have any problems. Trouble arises when a student who has registered in one municipality moves to the other one without updating his address with the county clerk’s office,” Scott Weingart ’09, former president of College Democrats, said in an email.

The election of November 2008 was particularly confusing; students who had moved without updating their registrations had to vote by provisional ballot, and many were confused over where they were eligible, Weingart explained.

In some cases, students were registered in the wrong municipality because they were misinformed by county officials confused over where the dorms lay, Wolanin said.

“Some students went to the wrong polling place and were directed to go to the right one; a few went to the right polling place and were directed to go to the wrong one,” Weingart wrote. One student, who then lived in the Township but had previously voted in the Borough, was twice sent back and forth between polling places by confused voting officials.

Both Princeton College Republicans and College Democrats officially support the merger, citing simplification of the voting process and the savings that consolidation would potentially bring to the community.

In the past few weeks, members of College Democrats have volunteered as door-to-door canvassers with Unite Princeton.

Community Policing

The bulk of the commission’s predicted savings would come from consolidating and shrinking the size of the police force.

The new department would gradually reduce the headcount of sworn officers from 60 to 51 over a three-year period. The new department would reinstate specific officer roles that were cut from the existing departments, including officers dedicated to traffic and community relations.

“The proposed consolidation plan would reinstitute a community policing division, which was cut because of budget constraints,” Wolanin said. A community policing division would work to maintain long-term relationships with community groups like the student population, he said, and be more concerned with local traffic issues like enforcing respect for pedestrian crossings.

Students who are unhappy with the current relationship to the Borough Police Department said they would welcome the change in the department.

“I’ve heard a lot of people say that the Township Police are a lot better at community policing and the Borough Police don’t do as well,” O’Neill said. “The Borough Police just spend a lot of time on Prospect Avenue at midnight arresting people with open containers, which doesn’t really seem like as big an issue as improving relations with the community.”

University students must register in the municipality in which their dormitory is located by Oct. 18 in order to participate in the consolidation vote.