PACKET EDITORIAL, Sept. 26, 2000
Princeton Future, the ad-hoc citizens group that wants to help guide the development and redevelopment of downtown Princeton, has patterned itself – in both name and mission – after a like-minded organization that operates at the state level.
And if there is a single lesson the Princeton group can draw from the experience of New Jersey Future, the nonprofit organization that is aggressively pushing for implementation of the State Development and Redevelopment Plan, it is that even the noblest of objectives can only be achieved if the exercise of political will is supported by the force of law.
New Jersey Future was formed by civic, professional, business and academic leaders around the state to serve as an advocacy group for the State Plan, the document that is intended to guide development decisions from Cape May to High Point in a thoughtful, rational manner.
The State Plan stands for the proposition that public land-use policies should drive private development decisions, rather than private development decisions driving public investment. To achieve this goal, the State Plan seeks to direct development projects to urban and inner-suburban areas, places where the infrastructure already exists to support and sustain such projects, and to steer development away from rural and environmentally sensitive areas where the preservation and protection of fast-disappearing open space is a major public-policy objective.
To preserve open space and make maximum use of existing infrastructure, the State Plan calls for future development to be clustered in "centers" – small towns, villages and hamlets – instead of sprawling across the landscape in a manner that has become all-too-familiar in the Garden State.
New Jersey Future has been a loyal and tireless support group for the State Plan. Its members have attended State Planning Commission meetings, testified before legislative committees, participated in "cross-acceptance" sessions linking municipal and county master plans with the State Plan and otherwise championed the cause of sensible, intelligent land-use planning at the state level.
Despite New Jersey Future’s best efforts, however, the State Plan has failed dismally to shift development decisions from private developers to public policy-makers. (If the State Plan had any teeth at all, Hopewell Township, rather than Merrill Lynch, would be deciding how to develop the I-95 corridor.) For all its good intentions, the State Plan has done little to steer development to centers, to limit sprawl or to preserve open space. Conceptually, the State Plan is a masterpiece; in practice, it is a bust.
The problem is the underlying legislation. It dangles carrots in front of municipal, county and state planners to do the right thing, but it provides no sticks to prod those who choose not to. Like New Jersey Future, the legislation does a lot of imploring, prodding, cajoling, beseeching and cheerleading for the cause of state land-use planning, but it contains no substantive provisions for turning its vision into reality.
The lesson for Princeton Future is this: Preparing a plan for the development and redevelopment of downtown Princeton will be a pointless exercise unless that plan has teeth. The political will to adopt a downtown master plan must be backed up by a legal mechanism for implementing it. That means creating some sort of downtown improvement zone, and establishing an entity – public, private or some combination of the two – that has planning and zoning and taxing powers that enable it to direct development in a manner that carries out the plan.
On Friday, the founders of Princeton Future will kick off their campaign to craft a comprehensive plan for downtown Princeton. The tendency at this early, organizing stage will be to focus on where we as a community want to to go. With the experience of New Jersey Future in mind, it would be wise to start focusing equal or greater attention on how we are going to get there.