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PRINCETON: Crumiller looks ahead to council challenges

   The timing was perfect. Borough Councilwoman Jenny Crumiller sat at the Princeton train station talking about her political future as the Dinky train pulled in on a recent afternoon.
   Ms. Crumiller, a candidate for the council of the consolidated Princeton, has made it a crusade to halt the planned relocation of the Dinky line to accommodate Princeton University’s proposed arts and transit project. Yet she is more than just about the saving the Dinky.
   In a 28-minute interview, she said she is excited about the consolidation of the two communities, a merger that she was squarely behind. She said there are challenges ahead, and offered that she did not think “the town and gown” relationship with the university is as bad as it is made out to be.
   ”I’m looking forward to the new beginning with the new town. I think it’s exciting,” she said. “And I think I’m looking forward to getting down and doing some of the nitty-gritty things,” she said. She said a challenge is reconciling the two towns’ respective zoning ordinances. “A lot of times, it seems like applications come for development (and) people complain, ‘How can this be? How can the zoning allow it?’”
   Ms. Crumiller, 53, is a native of Newark, Del., although she graduated from high school in Ohio. Growing up, she found the novel “To Kill a Mocking Bird” a huge influence on her life. “It made me conscious of fairness, justice, equality,” Ms. Crumiller said.
   She attended but dropped out of the University of Delaware, where she met her future husband, Jon. The couple fashioned a blend of their surnames — hers Crum, his Miller — to come up with Crumiller.
   They came to New Jersey, where her husband started a company. After stops in Hightstown and Lawrenceville, the couple moved to Princeton Township in 1990, later moving to the borough. As an adult, she earned her bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University. She has listed her occupation as councilwoman, although she has no regular full-time job.
   Her first stab at local activism was in the early 1990s fighting a plan by University Medical Center to build a garage by tearing down houses.
   ”In the hospital case, it was a case where public sentiment was behind the hospital, but people didn’t know the facts,” she said.
   She won a seat on Borough Council in 2009. Though she can’t think of any mistakes she’s made or votes she would do over, she said she wishes the vote on rezoning for the future Arts and Transit project had gone differently.
   ”This was a huge undertaking, this rezoning of this whole area, and a few people — and I’m one of them — vociferously objected,” she said. “But I don’t think that signals a dysfunctional relationship. That’s what happens when there’s an institution in town and a local government that has to make land-use decisions. So I don’t think it is actually ‘town and frown,’ maybe in this instance.”
   Ms. Crumiller laughs off a suggestion that she is the defacto boss of the local Democratic Party, which she helped to reshape.
   ”I felt the Democratic Party could use some shaking up. It was pretty small, not welcoming to new people,” she said.
   She also dismisses talk that she would hold sway over council candidate Patrick Simon, who works at Princeton Consultants, the firm that Ms. Crumiller’s husband helped start and where he serves as vice president and chief operating officer.
   Of Mr. Simon, she said: “I think he’ll be 100 percent independent. He does not work for me.”
   Ms. Crumiller, Mr. Simon and four others are running to serve on the six-member council. They have only one Republican challenger, Geoff Aton.
   Asked how a Democrat-controlled council would work with Republican mayoral candidate Richard Woodbridge if he won, she replied: “I’m not sure. Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it — if we come to it.”