PACKET EDITORIAL, Sept. 19
By:
Princeton Future, the impressive group of civic, professional, business and academic leaders who have banded together to promote an integrated approach to making planning and development decisions in downtown Princeton, has the potential to leave a lasting mark on our community.
It also has the potential to fall flat on its face.
What Princeton Future must do is mobilize the many and varied constituencies affected by downtown development to adopt a common vision of what they want Princeton to look like in the years to come – and, just as important, to develop a planning mechanism for making that vision a reality.
What Princeton Future must not do is sit around talking about a lot of lofty ideas for avoiding the kind of piecemeal, project-by-project decision-making that has characterized downtown development in the past. If it cannot turn that talk, and those ideas, into action, it will be wasting the time and talent of its members – and, worse, squandering what may be the last, best hope for implementing a coherent downtown development plan for Princeton.
The problem that Princeton Future was created to help resolve is an obvious one: Development decisions in downtown Princeton are too important to be made on a site-by-site, application-by-application basis. What the Princeton Public Library decides to do on its property will have a direct and lasting impact on what the Arts Council of Princeton can or cannot do – and both will affect future plans for Palmer Square, for stores and offices along Witherspoon Street, for residents in the John-Witherspoon neighborhood, for merchants on Nassau Street and for citizens of the entire region.
The present mechanism for making these decisions is inadequate to the task. The Princeton Borough Zoning Board and Princeton Regional Planning Board have the authority, by law, to approve or disapprove development applications – but only on a case-by-case basis. They can, for example, calculate the number of parking spaces required by current ordinances to accommodate additional square footage sought by the library or the Arts Council or Palmer Square, and they can condition approval of each expansion request on the provision of adequate parking. But the cumulative impact of these major development decisions cannot be divined by counting parking spaces; indeed, the adequacy of downtown parking is an issue that transcends these individual, site-specific reviews. It needs to be addressed in a different, broader context.
That’s where Princeton Future comes in. At the heart of its proposal for developing downtown Princeton is the designation of what it calls the "Downtown Core" – the area bordered by Nassau Street, Bayard Lane, Paul Robeson Place/Wiggins Street and Moore Street – as a special district, subject to its own master plan and overseen by a public-private corporation charged with implementing that plan. This approach would not just lay out a vision for the downtown Princeton of the future; it would also establish an orderly process for making development decisions that can fulfill this vision.
Achieving this goal will not be easy. Even those who recognize the inadequacies of the status quo may feel threatened by the boldness of the Princeton Future proposal. It would, after all, oblige the zoning and planning boards, as well as the Princeton Borough Council, to willingly turn over a generous amount of their own planning and decision-making powers. Moreover, close and careful attention will need to be paid to the reactions of myriad constituencies – from business associations to neighborhood groups, from churches to civic and social clubs, from political leaders to just-plain citizens – that have a stake in the community.
In short, Princeton Future will have to listen in order to lead. We have every confidence that it will do both. We offer the leaders of this group not only our profound thanks for taking on this important mission, but also our enthusiastic support for the lofty objective they have set for themselves – and for all of Princeton.?