Dozens Attend Bancroft Redevelopment Meeting Wednesday

Tom Kenny and his wife Lee had low expectations Wednesday before the well-dressed man in the middle of the room started talking.

It was the first public participation meeting in an effort to come up with a new redevelopment plan for the 18.7-acre Bancroft site on Kings Highway.

Never mind that the institution for the developmentally disabled that has occupied the site for the past 127 years has not yet vacated it. It’s been more than 10 years since Bancroft officials decided it would be too expensive to rehabilitate its aging campus, and a growing chorus of neighbors, like the Kennys, applauded. 

They say traffic and persistent problems with a growing population of troubled clients at the facility had made life on their nearby Roberts Avenue home difficult.

So when Phil Caton, a principal in the Clarke Caton Hintz planning firm began speaking Wednesday evening, the Kennys felt they had already heard it all.

“There’s no sense in us coming to this meeting,” Lee Kenny, 50, a homemaker, said. “They’re going to give us just want they want anyway.”

A crowd of about three dozen people attended the meeting, along with borough officals, including commissioners Jeffrey Kasko, Ed Borden and Mayor Tish Colombi.  The three are the borough’s top elected officials.

Colombi said they were "starting with a clean slate." 

Kenny and her husband, Tom, concluded the borough needed tax revenue from another institutional use of the property. They preferred low-density residential housing on the site. Others have called for more open space and recreational fields on one of the last parcels for potential development in this 2.5-square-mile, nearly 400-year-old borough.

A previous Bancroft redevelopment plan was centered around a nursing home campus with a multistory building and some residential homes. Neighbors like the Kennys successfully labeled the plan a high-density development and launched a campaign to defeat it. In October, the commissioners killed the plan after six years and $210,000 to develop it.

Commissioner Ed Borden has previously said the planning cost will be added into the sale price if a developer buys the property. Bancroft had previously listed the sale price at $20 million, a borough official said.

Charles Young, 67, an attorney who lives in the age-restricted Mews development across Kings Highway from Bancroft, said he didn’t know whether the next redevelopment plan should include institutional use of not. But he was willing to listen to what Caton had to say.

“I don’t know what is viable there,” he said.

Caton said his firm is charged with presenting three development options to the commissioners. Borough officials said they want to have a new plan by June.

The borough and Clarke Caton Hintz launched a new website this week. The address is: bancroftredevelopment.com/the-site.html.

Clarke Caton Hintz of Trenton, won the contract, in part, with a slick presentation of services, including the ability to launch a website as the public face of the project, according to the commissioners. 

The website includes background information on the Bancroft parcel, information on the planning process, news and announcements, meeting dates and a drop-down menu on how to “Get Involved!” Caton said the PowerPoint demonstration presented Wednesday will be added to the site on Thursday.

Lack of public support killed the last redevelopment plan late last year before Clarke Caton Hintz was hired.