Board ready to do its job — planning

PACKET EDITORIAL, April 19

By: Packet Editorial
   If there is one thing planning boards are not very adept at doing — especially in New Jersey — it’s planning.
   If planning boards really did live up to their name, don’t you think there would be a lot more gardens in the Garden State? Wouldn’t there still be a few scenic vistas unspoiled by sprouting McMansions? Wouldn’t you be able to drive more than a couple of blocks without encountering another strip mall?
   It’s a safe bet that New Jersey — particularly central New Jersey — would not have developed the way it has over the past couple of decades if planning boards spent more time planning. If they did, desirable development would go where communities want it to go, not where developers choose to put it. And unwanted development wouldn’t go anywhere at all.
   Planning boards are, by their nature, reactive. They react to proposals made by private developers, rather than directing development where they, and the residents they represent, want it to go. They work diligently to make sure detention and retention basins are properly situated, that any trees that need to be taken down are replaced elsewhere, that setbacks and building heights and floor-area ratios meet regulatory requirements.
   Oh, sure, planning boards are responsible for creating and regularly updating community master plans. Presumably, these plans paint a picture of what their communities are supposed to look like 10 or 20 years down the road. But, as even a cursory glance at a typical master plan will tell you, they tend to be rose-colored renderings (accompanied by a fanciful narrative) of the ideal community, as opposed to a realistic blueprint for what the community is actually going to look like in a decade or two.
   So what the Princeton Regional Planning Board is doing this week — kicking off a series of meetings to consider potential future uses of the Medical Center at Princeton on Witherspoon Street — is noteworthy. Instead of waiting for Princeton HealthCare System to decide what it (or whoever buys it) wants to do with this property after the hospital moves out of town in a few years, the Planning Board wants to start finding out now what the community wants to do with it.
   This is no idle exercise, like dusting off and updating some arcane element of the Princeton Community Master Plan (although making changes to the Master Plan will definitely be an important part of it, since current zoning limits the Witherspoon Street site to hospital and medical-related uses). But the process the Planning Board is initiating will go far beyond this narrow focus. It will assemble a wide range of ideas and opinions about what to do with this extraordinarily significant piece of property that straddles the borough-township border — a site that could be used for any number of important public purposes.
   It could, for example, provide needed housing for senior citizens, graduate students, people of low and moderate income or some combination thereof. It could incorporate a mix of commercial, office and residential uses. Part of it could be turned into a neighborhood health-care center or clinic. These are just a few of the many ideas that have been kicked around, informally, by participants in Princeton Future’s Witherspoon Street Corridor Study, which has been looking closely at not only the hospital site but the surrounding neighborhood for the past several months.
   Now, the task of gathering the broadest range of community views on the future use of the hospital site, then establishing the formal mechanisms for achieving the desired end, properly shifts to the Planning Board. It’s a daunting task, but one we congratulate the board for undertaking. And we are confident that Princeton Future, as well as other groups and individuals interested in this process, will participate fully — giving the board all the input it needs to fulfill its most important but too often overlooked responsibility: planning.