By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
The Princeton Council will try again to see if it can redraw the boundaries for where on-street, overnight parking is prohibited, despite differences on the governing body.
The first cut at doing so failed at Monday’s council meeting, when Mayor Liz Lempert and three council members rejected expanding parking restrictions — that have been in place throughout the old borough for years — to parts of the former township. In general, those areas would have included streets where the two Princetons once bordered, with the regulation in place between 2:30 a.m. and 6 a.m. seven days a week.
The only way someone could park legally would have been to apply for and get a permit from the town for $120 a year. That’s the case now for people who live in the former borough.
But with the governing body split, a committee of three council members that had been looking at the parking issue will revisit it one more time.
“I think we’re going to do it soon,” said Councilwoman Jenny Crumiller, who sits on the committee with Council President Bernard P. Miller and Councilwoman Jo S. Butler.
The issue comes up as Princeton officials are in the midst of harmonizing ordinances of the former borough and township to create a new set of local laws for the consolidated municipality. In theory, they want to rationalize parking restrictions, to remove inconsistencies in places where some streets fall under two sets of regulations because the old borough-township line went through them.
Yet officials find themselves of different minds, such that Mayor Lempert said there is “no clear consensus” on the governing body. Opinions on council run the gamut from leaving things unchanged, to making small changes to prohibiting on-street parking overnight through the entire town.
One possibility is for council to essentially punt on the issue by adopting an ordinance that leaves the differences in parking regulations intact.
Ms. Butler said Thursday no one on council favors eliminating the overnight parking ban entirely. In fact, she said expanding it to the entire town would be the “fairest thing” to do.
She said that for people in the old township, the change would not be a burden since most of them already have driveways at their homes. She said she is willing to compromise to get an ordinance passed, although she summed up the situation as “fairly intractable.”
