LETTERS: Mayor should back residents’ interests

To the editor:
   
Last week your staff writer Joseph Harvie wrote an appropriately dispassionate article about the newly formed East Village Association’s efforts to stop rezoning attempts by The Morris Company to turn a 220 acre farm into three warehouses. As I read this article I was struck by what seemed a quick dismissal of this possibility by Mayor Gambatese.
   While I both applaud and respect our mayor’s public service, goodness knows that not many of us have the energy, means or inclination to serve our community in this capacity. He is a relative newcomer to this township and I am not sure that this kind of commerce and land development is what this community wants or needs.
   We can all see the number of unoccupied or scarcely occupied warehouses increasingly dotting our landscape. While we all read the news stories about truck traffic predictions for Route 1 in the upcoming decades, we seem to be ignoring the source of those predictions, more and more warehouses.
   I hope Mayor Gambatese’s legacy is not that he is the one who expediently recreates our town’s character into a wasteland of empty warehouses and low-paying jobs just because he faces the same budget problems that nearly every other town in America is currently facing.
   Not long ago my husband and I applied for a variance so that we could place a small metal shed on our property. This seemingly small attempt to follow municipal codes and laws became an event that took months and months to complete.
   I have lived here for 28 years and paid taxes and still, it seems, I have to make more effort than a company who has no ownership, but only a contract contingent upon rezoning. Our system of government will allow the Morris Co. to be treated with the utmost respect while South Brunswick’s citizens stand in line to speak at a public meeting, often dismissed as delivering unsubstantiated facts and rushed along for the sake of the clock.
   To the best of my information, The East Village Association members have given the mayor environmental, historical and practical information in order to provide him with the means and the will to do the right thing for this community. The Van Dyke Farmstead is as well located for most of this community as the Princeton Nursery land most recently acquired for public use. When will we hear our mayor reflect the interests of our community instead of the interests of the Morris Co. — at election time?
Janet Koenig
South Brunswick