Anne Zeman works hard for Kingston

CIL honors two for their efforts toward making town a better place

By: Joseph Harvie
   Every year, Citizens for Independent Living honors two township residents whose volunteer efforts have helped make the township a better place to live.
   This year, Anne Zeman, is one of those two people, and she will receive the Barry Indik Award this weekend. She will be honored along with Joan Luckhardt of Dayton.
   CIL is a local non-profit organization that works to find homes and job opportunities to adults with developmental disabilities.
   Ms. Zeman helped found the Kingston Initiative, now known as the Kingston Village Advisory Committee, in 1997. She is also a founding trustee of the Kingston Historical Society, a 25-year member of the League of Women Voters of the Princeton Area, which covers South Brunswick, and a member of the Mapleton Preserve Commission.
   She has also been on the township Environmental Commission since 2000 and the township Open Space Commission since 2002. She is a citizen member of the Lower Raritan Water Resource Association, a group that reports on water quality and quantity issues to the Middlesex County Board of Chosen Freeholders.
   A resident of Kingston, Ms. Zeman said she was happy to be recognized by CIL because of the good work the organization has done in the township.
   "Well, it’s really an honor to receive the award from this organization," Ms. Zeman said. "This is one of the best organizations in our community and probably statewide. They do such wonderful things for an important cause."
   Ms. Zeman will receive the award, named after a founder of the organization, at the annual Independence Ball at Pierre’s of South Brunswick on Georges Road on Saturday.
   Ms. Zeman, a publisher and author, said she began volunteering when she joined the League of Women Voters in 1991. Four years later she was named head of its Natural Resources Committee in 1995.
   "Through the league, I got extremely active in the New Jersey State Natural Resources Commission," Ms. Zeman said. "I did a lot of environmental work and got interested in environmental issues, particularly water issues, which led to me being appointed to the county Water Resources Board."
   Ms. Zeman said that she is the only citizen member of the board. The rest of its members are officials sent by municipalities to discuss water issues. She said the board is working to make sure changes are made to county roads to ensure that it is in compliance so they are in line with new state Department of Environmental Protection Stormwater regulations passed in February 2004.
   The regulations include marking storm drains with "No Dumping" signs and making sure municipalities have a map of their stormwater drainage systems.
   "In a way, I’m sort of your voice and the voice of others," Ms. Zeman said. "And this is one of the League’s main goals, to get citizens participating in government."
   In addition to her work with the League of Women Voters, Ms. Zeman is active in Kingston. She helped form the Kingston Initiative, which was a citizens group that wanted to have a single voice when dealing with the Princeton Township, South Brunswick and Franklin boards and commissions.
   Kingston is a historic village in the southwestern section of the township, portions of which are in South Brunswick, Franklin and Princeton townships.
   "We decided to get together because it was so difficult to get things done," Ms. Zeman said. "At the start, the group had to approach three different townships to get things done. Some were simple, like getting the same bus stop bench on both sides of Route 27. Other things were more difficult, like traffic issues."
   Once Kingston received Village Center designation from the state in 2001, the Kingston Initiative became the Joint Township Advisory Committee for the Village of Kingston, a nonpartisan committee made up of Kingstonians from Franklin and South Brunswick.
   "There is no parking in Kingston and people were constantly speeding through Kingston," Ms. Zeman said. "We worked to put up watch for pedestrian signs."
   From out of the committee came other groups, including the Kingston Historical Society, Kingston Greenways, and the Kingston Garden Club.
   Ms. Zeman wrote and helped produce the video "Kingston: Crossroads to History," a video about the history of the 325-year-old village. The video was produced in 2002, Ms. Zeman said, with the help of Jim Boyd, of Brunswick Acres.
   "It’s about the history of Kingston since Revolutionary times and prior to that too, but especially rRevolutionary times," Ms. Zeman said.
   She is also a member of the Kingston Greenways, an environmental group that has worked to secure an area of preserved open space, around Kingston, Ms. Zeman said.
   "We try to identify different places, like the Princeton Nurseries site and the Route 92 lands, the (state Department of Transportation) lands that are around Kingston, and we’d like to procure them," Ms. Zeman said.