The Princeton Council has approved a bond ordinance for $8.9 million to purchase a 153-acre parcel for open space preservation in the northwest corner of the town.
The Princeton Council voted unanimously to approve the bond ordinance at its Nov. 8 meeting, providing money to buy the largest remaining tract of undeveloped land in Princeton from Bryce Thompson and Lanwin Development LLC.
The property is bordered by Province Line Road and Cherry Valley Road. The land had been slated for development, but this puts an end to those plans. Its development would have meant cutting down about 4,000 trees in an old-growth forest, officials said.
Princeton will not have to foot bill in its entirety. The town will receive a $1.2 million grant from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s Green Acres program, and $2.5 million from Mercer County’s open space fund.
An additional $2.9 million will come from private fundraising. Princeton will make up the remainder through its municipal open space trust fund.
Wendy Mager, president of the Friends of Princeton Open Space, spoke in support of the bond ordinance during the public hearing on it at the Princeton Council’s Nov. 8 meeting.
“It will help the town to acquire a property that has excited me and our board and membership as much as any piece of land we worked to preserve since the 1980s,” Mager said.
“The majestic forest is strikingly beautiful and a very high quality habitat. The more we learn about forests, the more we realize that fragmenting them – even for limited development – is harmful to populations of birds and animals,” she said.
The parcel had been identified in the Princeton Master Plan for preservation when words like climate resiliency and sustainability were seldom used in the context of land preservation, but the purchase of the tract supports those concepts, she said.
The tract will be come part of the town’s “emerald necklace,” which seeks to connect open spaces throughout the town and to provide access to the land for residents.
Princeton Councilwomen Eve Niedergang and Mia Sacks, along with Municipal Administrator Bernard Hvozdovic, worked together with an assortment of nonprofit groups to put together the funding to buy the land.
Those groups include The Watershed Institute, which is a regional conservation group based in Pennington; the Friends of Princeton Open Space; and the Ridgeview Conservancy, which is based in Princeton; and the New Jersey Conservation Foundation.
The acquisition represents a model for a public-private partnership to support the goals of the town’s Climate Action Plan, Sacks and Niedergang said.