Plans for a Jewish Community Campus of Princeton Mercer Bucks will go before an open meeting of the West Windsor Planning Board on Dec. 12.

The proposal to establish the campus on an 80-acre site bordering Clarksville-Grovers Mills Road in the Princeton Junction section of West Windsor Township has already passed the site planning review process.

Paul Schindel, who cochairs the Jewish Community Campus Development Council with Ron Berman, said he has been very encouraged by the reception the project has been given by the West Windsor Township community — planning board members, officials, engineers, and citizens.

"We're very optimistic, and we've had a very good experience thus far in our exchanges with West Windsor Township," Schindel said. "The upcoming planning board review is something we're looking forward to eagerly as we look toward opening the campus — hopefully, in 2009."

Plans call for the construction of a 75,000-square-foot, multiuse facility that will be the new home many of the region's Jewish agencies — United Jewish Federation of Princeton Mercer Bucks, Jewish Community Foundation, Jewish Family and Children's Service of Greater Mercer County, and Jewish Community Center of the Delaware Valley, including its Early Childhood Learning Center and Abrams Day Camp.

The facility will also include classrooms, meeting rooms, a kosher cafe and kitchen, a state-of-the-art fitness facility, an indoor pool, an outdoor amphitheater, and some 20 acres of recreational areas and campgrounds.

"It gets us closer to breaking ground," council executive director Drew Staffenberg said of the planning meeting. "We are moving ahead and everything is in place."

Development of a Jewish community center can typically take 10 to 12 years, Schindel said.

"We are now about seven years into our process, and we are actually ahead of schedule," he said. "The question we're always asked is: 'When is this going to happen?' And the answer is it's happening as fast as it can."

Once the West Windsor Planning Board approves the project, site work will begin, according to Schindel — digging water-retention ponds, grading the land, providing for drainage, and clearing a minimum number of trees. "That's a literal groundbreaking at that point," he said.

At the same time, the council will pursue the three-to-five-month process of getting a building permit. "That means," Schindel said, "that we could actually start constructing the facility in the late spring."

Staffenberg said the capital campaign for the campus project has raised $19.5 million of its $28.5 million target. The key to making the project happen, he said, will be for every family in the community to do its part in closing that gap.

"What's exciting to me is that it happens as the community doing it together," Staffenberg said. "That's been my mantra, my message, all along. We want to build a community campus — for the community and by the community."

The meeting of the West Windsor Planning Board is set for Wednesday, Dec. 12, at 7 p.m. at the West Windsor Municipal Building, 271 Clarksville Rd., Princeton Junction.