PACKET EDITORIAL, Dec. 2
By: Packet Editorial
Princeton HealthCare System’s announcement this week that it plans to relocate to the FMC site on northbound Route 1 in Plainsboro ends one long period of suspense but may usher in an even longer period of uncertainty.
Once the handwriting went up on the wall, a couple of years ago, that the University Medical Center at Princeton would not remain in Princeton, there was really only one question on everyone’s mind: Where’s the hospital going? To the Canal Pointe site in West Windsor? The Bristol-Myers Squibb site in Lawrence? The Forrestal Village site in Plainsboro?
Now that the answer turns out to be none of the above, the attention shifts from the where to the how.
How will Plainsboro respond to the prospect of a nonprofit health-care facility taking up residence on what is now taxable property? How might those portions of the property not occupied by the tax-exempt hospital be developed, allowing Plainsboro to recoup the tax revenue forgone? How would that level and intensity of development affect the already nightmarish traffic situation along the Route 1 corridor?
How will Princetonians react to "their" hospital relocating to what is arguably the least convenient of all the locations considered? How, in the absence of a nearby overpass, are they going to get across Route 1 to the new hospital? How will emergency responders from points west Princeton, Montgomery and the Hopewells get there at rush hour, when vehicles along Washington Road and Harrison Street already back up all the way to (and sometimes across) the Lake Carnegie bridges?
How will the state Department of Transportation feel about having abandoned the proposed Millstone Bypass now that a major, traffic-generating regional health-care facility is headed for Route 1? How realistic is the preferred alternative tunneling Route 1 underneath Washington Road and constructing an intricate network of service roads in the Penns Neck area in light of the change in traffic patterns that will be generated by the hospital’s relocation?
How kindly will the state Department of Health look at PHCS’s certificate of need application, submitted several months after Capital Health System filed papers to build another state-of-the-art medical center just a few miles down the road?
How does Lubert-Adler Management, the Philadelphia developer poised to buy the Witherspoon Street property the hospital will vacate, plan to redevelop the site? How long is the discussion and debate over how to rezone the site going to go on? How receptive will the neighborhood be to any redevelopment plan that follows the rezoning?
How will Princeton University use the properties it plans to acquire the Merwick Rehab Hospital & Nursing Care facility off Bayard Lane and the surface parking lot on Franklin Avenue? How will the affected neighborhoods react to these plans? How will Princeton Borough assess these properties for tax purposes after their acquisition by the university? How will relations between the university and the borough already strained over how much (or how little) the university contributes annually to the municipality in lieu of taxes be affected by those assessments?
These questions, and many more, will presumably be answered over the next two to five years, the time frame set by PHCS to take this project from groundbreaking (2007) to completion (2010). As much as everyone involved in this undertaking would love to breathe a sigh of relief especially PHCS President and CEO Barry Rabner, who has shepherded the project from the should-we-move stage through the yes-we-should and here’s-where-we’re-moving stages the process is far from over.
In fact, the really hard part may just be beginning.