PRINCETON: Mayor Liz Lempert continues to walk a pragmatic fine line with environmental issues

By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
As a candidate and now as mayor, Liz Lempert presented herself as an advocate for the environment interested in making the community more green friendly.
As with other issues in the past three years, the mayor has favored a pragmatic approach to getting things done rather than investing her political capital in fighting battles she thinks that she cannot win. For instance, when environmental activists pushed for a policy change that the local business community opposed, she embraced a compromise option that merchants could accept.
“I think that you’ve got to pick your battles,” said a Lempert ally in the environmental movement.
Now in her re-election year, Mayor Lempert rejected the notion that she feels a need to make those activists happy, some of whom are vocal at council meetings in calling for more and faster action.
“I think it’s important to have people who are pushing us to act,” she said Tuesday in an interview. “At the same time, when you have either residents that are being affected or businesses that are being affected, it’s our job as elected officials to make sure that we listen to everybody and do our best to find a solution that’s going to work and be manageable and also address the important environmental concerns that are being raised.”
The town points to eco-friendly steps the municipality has taken on her watch: adding more open space; installing recycling containers on Nassau Street; and doubling the number of households enrolled in a voluntary composting program now to about 1,100 to 1,200.
“I think there’s plenty of work to be done,” she said. “And I actually feel like there’s plenty of areas where we can be working on projects that are going to have an impact and that are going to be easier to implement. It’s a balance.”
But some within the environmental movement have been frustrated with not enough getting done. Instead, they want a more aggressive agenda to combat what they see as imminent threats that climate change presents to the environment.
Some of their goals were outlined in two memos that the municipal environmental commission, an advisory board to the council, issued to the governing body in the past two years.
“They were not immediate demands, just issues that did and still need attention — with good faith attempts to investigate the plausibility of these options both from the financial standpoint as well as an environmental stewardship standpoint,” said Stephanie Chorney, now a former member of the commission, at the council meeting Jan.13.
On their priority list is a requirement that customers pay a fee for every plastic or paper shopping bag they take at stores. That idea never came up for a vote last year, despite advocates lobbying council. A fee or charge on bags is not their only goal.
In a 2014 memo, the commission recommended that the council “set a timeline to move toward reduced leaf pickup or no leaf pickup to most properties.” Instead, the commission favors a “leave the leaves” approach in which residents keep them on their property rather than putting them in the street for the town to collect. The commission said putting leaves at the curb is unsafe and bad for the environment.
“There’s certain groups and individuals who think that we should just completely phase it out,” Mayor Lempert said. “And there’s residents who depend upon it and might not easily have other alternatives.”
Another idea is a so-called “pay as you throw” system in which residents pay for trash disposal based on how much waste they generate. Also, the committee favored composting at all restaurants.
“The Princeton Environmental Commission has made recommendation after recommendation and sent memo after memo and none of the items on the list have been addressed,” said Bainy Suri, an environmental advocate, also at last week’s council meeting. “I really would like to see some measurable, impactful action and the use of an ordinance to accomplish that.”
The commission has seen some turnover, with three members of the board leaving, including one of Mayor Lempert’s neighbors. Ms. Chorney, a commissioner for three years, left before her term was up.
“I felt like I put a lot my personal time and energy into it, and hadn’t seen a lot of response,” Ms. Chorney said in a phone interview Wednesday.
Ms. Chorney, a resident for 15 years, said there has been “slow progress” in Princeton on environmental matters, in a community that she says lags behind others. She said it took “decades” for the town to finally put in recycling containers downtown, and that when the town acted, only between 10 and 12 bins were installed and poorly labeled.
“I think that for most of them, … people have new jobs, new commitments. They might be commuting longer than they used to,” Mayor Lempert said last week when asked about the departures on the commission.
For this year, Mayor Lempert will attend environmental commission meetings as the liaison to council, a role that other members of the governing body filled in the past.
Diane Landis, executive director of Sustainable Princeton, a nonprofit that works on local environmental initiatives, said Tuesday that there is more progress than some might see. She said Princeton is widely considered a leader when it comes to the environment.
The town is planning to install a solar array on a closed municipal landfill on River Road to produce solar energy; a plastic bag recycling program has collected one million bags in the first four months of the program’s existence.
Asked about the tensions between environmental advocates who favor immediate action versus those taking gradual steps, Ms. Landis replied: “I feel the urgency of now, too, but we also understand that the system takes a long time to change.
“But that’s what we’re here to do,” she continued. “We’re here for the long haul.”
“I believe we should, in everything we do, be moving toward a more sustainable way of delivering services,” Mayor Lempert said. “That doesn’t mean throwing everything we do out overnight.” 