WEST WINDSOR: Carnegie Center West plans get OK

By Kristine Snodgrass, Staff Writer
   WEST WINDSOR — The Township Planning Board passed a resolution at its meeting last week to accept the traffic management options for an office building leased by Princeton University in Carnegie Center West.
   Representatives from the Greater Mercer Transportation Management Association and Boston Properties, the real estate investment trust that owns the properties, appeared before the board last month to propose the options.
   In November 2007, the board granted site plan approval to Building 701 of Carnegie Center West, a suburban office park located off Route 1 south.
   At the time, the university had a 15-year lease on the structure with an option to purchase after 10 years, according to Boston Properties officials. The university expressed that a desire the building be part of a campus-wide plan to maintain a walkable and pedestrian-friendly campus.
   As a condition of the approval, passed as a resolution by the council in January 2008, Boston Properties was asked by the board to present nonmandatory traffic management options.
   Other options presented to the board last month included carpooling, employee IRS deductions for mass transportation, transit trip planning, a ride home service, preferential parking for carpool and alternative fuel vehicles and bicycle racks.
   The options will supplement the university’s free shuttle bus service, which will extend to include the office park.
   In other business at the meeting, the board continued discussion of its ongoing effort to create a sustainability element to its Master Plan.
   Planning Board Chairman Marvin Gardner said the element would enforce the use of sound energy practices and environmentally sound methods in construction and maintenance.
   If approved by the board, West Windsor would be the first municipality in the state to take that step towards mandating such environmentally friendly practices in planning, he said.
   At the meeting, the board decided that in order to make elements of the comprehensive plan enforceable, it would be written piecemeal into ordinances, he said.
   The matter will be next discussed at the board’s May 20 meeting, and the board welcomes input from the community throughout the planning process, he said.
   ”Like any master plan, it is a living document modified over a period in time,” he said.
ksnodgrass@
centraljersey.com