PACKET EDITORIAL, Nov. 25
By: Packet Editorial
Virtually everyone who attended Monday night’s meeting of the West Windsor Township Council acknowledged that there are many more important things in life than whether the 08550 ZIP code designation is changed from Princeton Junction to West Windsor.
Which makes one wonder why the council devoted nearly the entire meeting to this matter, at the expense of addressing an agenda item of far greater importance the designation of the area around the Princeton Junction at West Windsor train station as an "area in need of redevelopment."
True, there were people in the audience who had strong opinions about the ZIP code designation strong enough, as it turns out, to convince four of the five council members to reverse course, repudiate Mayor Shing-Fu Hsueh and preserve the Princeton Junction postal address.
In so doing, it’s worth noting, the council swam against a strong tide in New Jersey. For years, identity-starved suburbs have seized every opportunity to literally make a name for themselves.
Ever since East Paterson cleverly changed its name to Elmwood Park (thereby disassociating itself from its urban neighbor, while still allowing the town’s high school athletes to proudly wear their EP sweaters), New Jersey suburbs have fought to establish their own identity. Most didn’t have to go to the extreme of changing their names; they simply requested their own ZIP codes. Thus did sprawling suburban townships like Hamilton, Hillsborough and Monroe succeed in getting their names on the map.
This was Mayor Hsueh’s motivation: to get West Windsor on the map. What he underestimated was how passionately the residents of the immediate Princeton Junction area relate to their own neighborhood and how relatively uninterested the rest of the township is about this whole ZIP code business. What the council heard was a deafening chorus of opposition from Princeton Junction, and barely a peep from Penns Neck, Dutch Neck, Edinburg or any other neighborhood.
So the council did what most councils would do under the circumstances. Knowing a vote to change the ZIP code designation would cost them dearly in Princeton Junction, without necessarily buying them any support elsewhere, four council members went where the electoral arithmetic took them along the path of least resistance.
Regrettably, it took them several hours to get there on Monday night. As a consequence, the council’s consideration of plans to transform the area around the Princeton Junction train station into a transit village has now been put off until December and the all-important step of formally designating this area as an area in need of redevelopment may be put off even longer.
The danger here is not that this effort will lose momentum; we’re confident that Mayor Hsueh and the council will ultimately press ahead with this exciting redevelopment project, even in the face of likely opposition from some of the same quarters where the ZIP code change evoked such an outcry. The difference here is that the action will be truly substantive, rather than merely symbolic.
But at the same time West Windsor is contemplating development of a transit village and pursuing a major state grant to support it so are Hamilton, New Brunswick and a number of other municipalities. If West Windsor’s plans don’t progress as quickly as Hamilton’s, if the township is less aggressive in pursuing state smart-growth funding than New Brunswick, we fear potential developers may lose interest and the state may run out of money. Either of these conditions could set West Windsor’s plans back even more.
Which is why, in the overall scheme of things, it isn’t what the council did Monday night that’s particularly troubling. It’s what the council didn’t do.

