Builder should offer more than ultimatums

In a candid interview with the Sentinel last week, developer Russ Richardson issued an ultimatum of sorts to South Brunswick: His village center or a massive office complex. South Brunswick will have to weigh its decision carefully but cannot do so based on such pressuring.

Richardson, president of Richardson Properties, envisions a new Main Street-style development complete with upscale apartments, coffee shops and trendy small businesses on what's today a 50-acre field near the intersection of Routes 130 and 522. Richardson is a straight shooter, and his passion and preference for this project is clear. However, he warns, leaving the property vacant is not an option. If the township's leaders will not work with him, he will build exactly what's permitted - some 350,000 feet of office space, rounded out with 1,200 parking spaces, by his estimation.

We've heard Richardson's style of tough talk before. Remember when the developer Joe Morris didn't get his way on the rezoning of the Pulda farm for warehouses in 2005, then "threatened" to build the 76 luxury houses the property was zoned for? In a classic rant, the builder's attorney, Frank Petrino, said, "The owners are not interested in selling the property for farmland preservation, so we [have] one of two options: eat the dirt or develop it. And we don't like eating dirt."

Sound familiar? Here's what Richardson said last week. "Ask yourself this on the bottom line: would you rather have a 350,000-square-foot office building or would you rather have a village center with mixed use?" He later added, "This is what we'll be forced to do. You get what you zoned for."

One lesson Richardson should take from Morris' missteps is that the Township Council doesn't take too kindly to ultimatums. Not only was the warehouse rezone shot down, but the housing plan has gone nowhere since, and officials are now carefully weighing their options on whether or not to buy the site as open space.

Richardson would be much better off spending his energy on outreach than making threats. He's asking a lot of Dayton residents to go along with this - apparently more than he realizes - and he needs to put his efforts into being a good neighbor, not a bullying developer.

For starters, he can stop pretending this village center would be a better option traffic-wise for this already-busy area than an office complex. In the interview, he contended a village center would distribute traffic more evenly throughout the day. The truth is, office park traffic takes place during standard office hours, when residents are at work and don't have to deal with it. The village center would attract cars at all of the other hours - weekends, post-work times when people are trying to get home and around the clock to some extent, since people will live there.

What Richardson said is true: something will be built there. With its location next to a supermarket and a few major traffic arteries, the tract is not suitable for public use or preservation. He made his point. Now it's time for him to cool it on the rhetoric and start talking specifically, and constructively, about what he wants South Brunswick to invest itself in.