In some cases, information is the hobgoblin

PACKET EDITORIAL, Jan. 17

By: Packet Editorial
   "A foolish consistency," observed Ralph Waldo Emerson, "is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency, a great soul has simply nothing to do."
   Perhaps the opponents of the plan to put a five-story garage, two mixed-use buildings and a plaza on the site of the Park & Shop and Tulane Street lots in downtown Princeton think of themselves as great souls — who, with consistency, would have nothing to do. That might explain how they could argue mightily for the past year that the proposed 500-car garage is much too big, then turn around in the past couple of weeks and contend it’s too small.
   For months on end, we’ve been hearing from the Concerned Citizens of Princeton and other garage opponents that the planned structure is monstrously out of scale and character with the borough’s central business district. It’s too tall, too wide and altogether too massive for the site. It will attract more cars into a downtown area that already suffers from too much traffic. It should be scaled back, perhaps to a smaller parking "shelf" that would accommodate 250 to 300 cars at most, to be more proportional to its surroundings and more in keeping with Princeton’s downtown ambience.
   Once it became evident, however, that a smaller structure actually would be costlier to taxpayers (not to mention a great deal uglier) than the larger garage, opponents wasted no time shifting gears. Now, it seems, the garage will be too small. At 500 spaces, it won’t be able to handle the demand generated by the Princeton Public Library, other existing downtown establishments and the new restaurant, retail stores, food market and 77 apartment units that are part of the development plan.
   This isn’t the only bit of self-contradictory argumentation put forward by the garage opponents. For several months, they’ve been complaining that the garage project isn’t likely to be completed before next December, forcing downtown merchants to struggle through two successive holiday shopping seasons without adequate parking. But now that the borough is on the verge of signing an agreement with the developer, Nassau HKT Associates, to press ahead with the project, opponents are asking: What’s the rush? Reconstruction of the library apparently won’t be finished by December, they point out, so why make a hasty decision on the garage?
   The quality of debate in Princeton Borough, it should be noted, is no lower than in Princeton Township, where opponents of the deer-management program have compiled an impressive record of trying to have it both ways. When the township’s hired guns started culling the deer herd two years ago, opponents said it wouldn’t work; the deer would simply reproduce at a faster rate to make up for the population decline. Then, after the second year, when it became obvious that the culling had made a significant dent in the size of the herd, opponents called for a moratorium because there plainly weren’t enough deer to warrant continued culling.
   There are a couple of common themes here. The first is desperation; opponents of both the garage in the borough and the deer-management program in the township have reached the point where they’ll put forward any argument — even if it directly contradicts an earlier one — to advance their cause. The second is sophistry; instead of gathering all the pertinent facts, listening to all the reasonable arguments and then deciding which position to take, the opponents have already taken a position and are now manipulating all the facts and arguments they can muster to support it.
   We wonder what Emerson would have to say about such foolish inconsistency.