With the recent approval of the site plan from the West Windsor Planning Board, the new Jewish Community Campus of Princeton Mercer Bucks moves one step closer to reality.
January 08, 2008
In what leaders are heralding as a major milestone, the West Windsor Planning Board has approved plans to build the new Jewish Community Campus of Princeton Mercer Bucks on an 80-acre site in West Windsor Township.
Meeting Dec. 12, the board unanimously approved plans for a 77,022-square-foot, multi-use facility that will be the new home of prominent Jewish agencies in the region, including the United Jewish Federation of Princeton Mercer Bucks.
The next step, according to Drew Staffenberg, executive director of the Jewish Community Campus Development Council, will be to obtain a permit from West Windsor Township to build on the wooded site, which borders Clarksville-Grovers Mills Road in the Princeton Junction section of the township.
The council hopes to break ground in the late spring or early summer, he said.
“This is a major step forward in our building the new campus,” said Staffenberg. “It’s what we’ve been working on for the last six months or more.”
Drew Staffenberg, executive director of the Jewish Community Campus Development Council, displays an architect’s rendering of the campus.
In addition to becoming the new headquarters for the United Jewish Federation of Princeton Mercer Bucks, the campus will serve as the home of the Jewish Community Foundation of Princeton Mercer Bucks, the Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Greater Mercer County, and the Jewish Community Center of Princeton Mercer Bucks, including its Early Childhood Learning Center and Abrams Day Camp.
The new center will house classrooms, meeting rooms, a library, a kosher cafe, a glatt kosher kitchen, a state-of-the-art fitness facility, and an indoor pool.
The campus will also include an outdoor amphitheater and some 20 acres of recreational areas and campgrounds, plus a 7,000-square-foot multipurpose camp structure. Plans also call for 272 parking spaces on the site.
The public record shows that as part of the planning board approval process, the campus development council agreed to pay an affordable housing fee of 2 percent of the project’s assessed value. In addition, the council granted the township a 200-foot-wide easement along a part of the property adjacent to Duck Pond Run. Such allowances are mandated, according to Staffenberg. “Anybody who builds has to give to public housing.”
As the planning process moves forward, the campus development council is raising funds toward an overall capital campaign goal of $28.5 million. “We’re at about 70 percent of our goal,” Staffenberg said, “and we need to raise the rest.”
Council cochair Paul Schindel expressed gratitude for the board approval.
“What I’m told is that the West Windsor Planning Board has a reputation for being very deliberate in their approval process,” he said. “Thanks, in part, to Drew and our consultants, architects, and planners, we were able to give the township precisely what they needed without getting into a situation where we had to go back and forth or struggle through the process.”
In particular, Schindel said, recognition should go to his cochair, Ron Berman, and to Marvin Jacobson, a member of the council, for their roles in the approval process. Jacobson, a retired architect, worked on developing the site and building plans that were submitted to the township, he said, and Berman was “the mastermind.”
Schindel said that raising money for the new site remains “the ultimate hurdle.”
“We are pleased that in the past several months, the number of donors to the campus campaign has more than doubled,” he said. “We look forward to having more contributors and more large gifts in 2008.”