Boro Candidates Debate - Watch the Video

On  Monday Oct 4, candidates for Borough Council participated in a forum televised live by Princeton Community TV.  Candidates Jo Butler, Peter Marks and Roger Martindell answered questions posed by Linda Mather, a moderator from the League of Women Voters.  The fourth candidate, Roland Foster Miller, was unable to attend but submitted a statement to be read.

2010 Princeton Borough Council Candidates Forum from Princeton Community Television on Vimeo.

Saving the Dinky is about the only point upon which all three Borough Council candidates  agreed.  Otherwise they offered quite differing options to a series of questions garnered from the public and put to them by the moderator.

Not surprisingly, finances were at the center of the discussion. While noone had a quick fix for these hard economic times, Martindell recommended asking for more payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT) from Princeton University;  Marks stressed fiscal restraint and cuts in services;  and Butler favored further consolidation of services.

The two Democrats stepped carefully around the question of consolidation.  Both believed in the need for further study, saying it is a complex issue that has changed since the last study was conducted in 1996.  Marks alone declared the new consolidation study to be “a waste of money”, and the consolidation of the town to be a “recipe for loss of control”.  But Marks was not averse to the possibility of more shared services, such as consolidating the courts.

On where to cut spending, Martindell proposed combining the police forces.  Marks would cut the shade tree commission.

None of the candidates had an easy answer to the stickiest political question of the day, what to do about revaluation.  Butler urged re-investigation.  Martindell called for mitigating the negative effects, while taking the fight to the state legislature.  Marks acknowledged that in some cases the taxes are crushing, but attributed the problem to the 15-year time lag since the previous round.

Township Council candidates will meet at Princeton Community TV next Monday, Oct 11, to take their turn at answering the pressing questions of the day.  That forum will be streamed live on AllPrinceton.com, and televised live on Princeton Community TV (Comcast Ch. 30 or Verizon FiOS Ch. 45).

About the Author

Donna Liu

Founder, AllPrinceton

Donna Liu is a digital journalist who has lived in Princeton with her family since 2002.  She founded AllPrinceton in 2010 as an online hub for community news and information.  At Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, she built UChannel - an online archive of public affairs lectures in academia.  Before that she established and managed CNN International's Asia Production Center in Hong Kong.