Gardner and Hsueh Fear-Mongering Continues

The misinformation and fear-mongering being spread by Mayor Hsueh and his Planning Board Chairman reached a new level in the February 6, 2009 Princeton Packet. Their supporters can only hope that the Packet took their quotes out of context.

Mayor Hsueh is quoted as saying that he is "surprised that the council wants to vote in march." Let's do the math, shall we? Council received the Redevelopment Plan from the Planning Board on February 4th. If the Clerk's Office had issued the necessary public notice to the newspapers immediately for a special meeting, the earliest that the meeting could have been held would be Monday, February 9th. Assuming introduction of the plan that evening, the first time that the public hearing on the plan could be held would be February 23rd.

But that time line would have meant that the public would have been denied an opportunity to review the plan and provide the comments that the Planning Board has denied them.

More importantly, there has been unanimous agreement by Council and the Township professionals that the zoning ordinances implementing the Plan must be introduced at the same time the plan is introduced. Those zoning ordinances still are being written. It was not possible to introduce the plan, even if we wanted to do so, on February 9th. We do not know when we will have those zoning ordinances in hand. Consequently, it is impossible to move a vote on the plan and its implementing ordinances before March as Mssrs. Gardner and Hsueh would have us do.

Moreover, Mayor Hsueh simply misrepresents the truth when he says that taking another week or so to complete the plan will hurt our chances to get funding from the state. Mr. Hsueh would enlist Council in his effort to deny the public its opportunity to be heard on the plan -- a plan that has not been available very long for the public to review, much less comment upon.

Mr. Gardner's statement quoted in the Packet that "every issue was thoroughly vetted and discussed by the Planning Board in an open and transparent manner" is patently false. Let's hope that he was miquoted. If the statement were true, we would not have seen four different community organizations come to Council the following Monday night to complain that their input had either been ignored or prevented because of the precipitous cancellation of two of the meetings scheduled for receiving those comments.

Mr. Gardner also misrepresents my statements during the public comment period at the last Planning Board meeting on the plan. Those comments were limited strictly to the narrow discussion that had preceded them. Moreover, those comments were made prior to the surprise announcement that the Planning Board was shutting down its review prematurely.

If I had known that Mr. Gardner was about to shut down the process, without bothering to consider the request that I made during my public comments, those comments would have been a very different set of statements.

I intend to move the redevelopment plan process expeditiously, but unlike Mr. Gardner and Mr. Hsueh, I intend that the public not be misled and I intend that the public be given its opportunity to provide its input -- just as we have promised these past couple of years. To deny the public its opportunity at the 11th hour just as the entire plan emerges into full view for the first time would be an injustice to our taxpayers and our future residents who depend on us to make sound planning decisions rather than make short-sighted decisions for the sake of political expediency.