By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Princeton officials said they have not identified where the money would come from to renovate Nassau Street or ruled out turning to the merchants along the street to help foot the bill of a possible multi-year project.
The town had a three-hour “visioning” workshop on Saturday inside the Garden Theatre and outside on Nassau Street, to gather input on how the public wants the main thoroughfare in town to look. In the theater, there were informal work sessions with the consultant the town hired to hear what things people liked or didn’t. Outside there were displays — like two benches facing each other and a bike rack in the street — to give people a sense of what was possible.
Officials have said the streetscape — with its sidewalk needing to be replaced and other aesthetics — is overdue for a facelift. The town is studying a stretch from Bayard Lane to Moore Street, although officials said there is no immediate timetable for work starting or an estimate of what it will cost.
“There’s not a timetable in terms of starting actual road construction. But if you are paying attention, if you’re out on the sidewalk and looking, you’ll see that repairs are needed,” Mayor Liz Lempert said during the morning session.
She said that a committee that she, Councilwoman Jo S. Butler and others serve on will meet to review the input that the town received and make recommendations to the full Princeton Council.
Earlier, Jim Constantine, from the consulting firm Looney Ricks Kiss, walked a group of 15 people through a presentation in which he asked them to vote on things like what kind of benches they preferred to how newspaper boxes should be arranged.
“We’re not doing a plan that says, do this here. We’re really establishing this palate of design improvements and a design vocabulary that then will be applied,” he said.
He said there likely would be a first “pilot block” where those improvements will be applied and moving on from there.
“Nassau Street has changed dramatically over time. And I think that’s important to recognize. The street isn’t, today, what it was at one time,” he said in recalling the last improvements on Nassau are nearly 30 years old.
“It’s time to just revisit this and rethink it and update it, keep what we like and update what we don’t,” said John Marshall, president of the Princeton Merchants Association.
“It looks like a streetscape that was designed over time and it looks tired, not well kept,” Ms. Butler said standing in front of the theater. “I think it’s showing its age.”
Yet there are unanswered questions, from whether the project happens on a short or a long schedule, where the money comes from to make it happen and does the town extend design ideas to Witherspoon Street.
“This is a first step, so we have a plan,” Mayor Lempert said. “And I think hopefully having a plan is going to help us obtain grant funding. But I think it would be hard to move forward with something like this without making a good faith, fairly exhaustive search for grant funding to help us.”
Later, Mayor Lempert said the “funding piece” for the project “has not been determined yet.” She raised the prospect of using parking meter revenue to pay for it.
Asked whether the town has ruled out making merchants pay for repairs, Ms. Butler said: “I don’t think anything is on or off the table at this point.”
“They probably wouldn’t like that,” Mr. Marshall said when asked how merchants would feel if they got the bill.
