EDITORIAL
By:
Just when you thought the Princeton Borough Council had the market cornered on procrastination, along comes the Princeton Regional Planning Board with an audacious challenge to the council’s preeminence in the practiced art of decision avoidance.
At least the Borough Council is moving forward, albeit glacially, on the issue of downtown parking. The Planning Board has just taken a giant step backward on the issue of siting a continuing-care retirement community in Princeton.
Late Thursday night, the Planning Board was expected to take a long-awaited vote on changes to the zoning ordinance governing CCRC development in Princeton. This vote was to come after months of discussion and debate, prompted by the application of Regent’s Mead to build a 301-unit CCRC on the 43-acre Our Lady of Princeton site in Princeton Township, over suitable standards for size, height and other specifications of CCRCs proposed for development as conditional uses in residential zones.
The board did not vote. Instead, it postponed action until its next meeting, scheduled for May 18, at which time it is expected to consider hiring a consultant to review the proposed ordinance. How this consultant’s review would differ from that of the Planning Board’s own Zoning Amendment Review Committee, which spent the last four months reviewing the proposed ordinance, is not entirely clear.
What is clear, given the controversy that has swirled around the proposed Regent’s Mead development, is that the board just can’t decide how it wants to handle this political hot potato. All of its members say they want a CCRC in Princeton, but there is no consensus on whether this particular development should be approved on this particular property at this particular size. Rather than force a vote on the issue — and face the wrath, depending on the outcome of the vote, of either the developer or the neighbors — they have resorted to the let’s-hire-a-consultant strategy to avoid, or at least delay, making a decision.
It won’t work. Consultant or no consultant, the Planning Board eventually must decide what the CCRC ordinance will and will not permit — and, by extension, whether the Regent’s Mead development will or will not be approved. Once that happens, either the developer or the neighbors (or both) are going to take the board to court; the developer already has, and the neighbors have left no doubt that they will.
Fine. Let them. That’s what courts are for. Planning boards, on the other hand, are charged with charting and articulating a community’s vision of how it wants to grow and develop, then setting guidelines and standards for how that growth and development will take place. And on the subject of CCRCs, the Princeton Regional Planning Board has done exactly that over the past six years, incorporating the community’s need for continuing-care facilities into its Master Plan and carving out specific guidelines and standards for permitting them as conditional uses in particular locations around the community.
This was not done hastily or carelessly; it was done over an extended period of time, with considerable input from professionals and the public, and with a clear understanding on the part of everyone involved that CCRCs are, by their nature, large institutional facilities that would not always be welcomed with open arms by their prospective neighbors. (It is instructive to note that the neighbors of the proposed Regent’s Mead development were equally unenthusiastic about an earlier plan to convert Our Lady of Princeton into offices.)
Perhaps the only use of this property that would avoid litigation (not to mention Planning Board approval) would be the permitted use — carving up the site for a housing development.
Even Planning Board members who can’t make up their minds what they do want surely would not wish this fate on a piece of property that represents one of the last remaining developable sites in Princeton Township.