Volume LXXIV, Number 45
Animal Adoptions Back To Normal at SAVE . . . . .5 Princeton Student’s Book Focuses on Mental Health During COVID . . . . . . . . .8 PU Endowment Increases 5 .6 Percent To $26 .6B . . . . . . . . . 10 PU Men’s Hockey Alum Halpern Helps Coach Tampa Bay to Stanley Cup . . . . . . . . .23 PHS Girls’ Tennis Falls In Sectional Semifinal, Ending Fall at 12-1 . . . .25
Will Rogers Cooks Up Some Comfort Food for the Morning After . . . . 15 Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Berkshire Hathaway Fox & Roach Realtors . .18, 19 Calendar . . . . . . . . . . 21 Classified Ads . . . . . . 32 Mailbox . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Obituaries . . . . . . . . . 30 New To Us . . . . . . . . . 22 Performing Arts . . . . . 16 Police Blotter . . . . . . . 11 Real Estate . . . . . . . . 32 Sports . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Topics of the Town . . . . 5 Town Talk . . . . . . . . . . 6
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Board of Health Issues Safe Community Pledge In Ongoing COVID Battle The Princeton Board of Health last week issued a COVID-Safe Community Pledge “as a proposal to the people, institutions, businesses, and visitors to Princeton to encourage shared community awareness and actions to protect each other.” “We have data in Princeton showing that our behavior can help mitigate this pandemic,” said Princeton Board of Health Chair Dr. George DiFerdinando. “That’s what makes me hopeful, that people have shown that they’re willing to make changes. This Pledge is a way of reinforcing what they already know and reorienting them for what they have to do in the fall and winter.” DiFerdinando emphasized that the Pledge is intended to acknowledge all the hard work that’s been done in Princeton so far to combat the virus, to focus attention on “what we need to keep doing,” and to realize that things are going to be different in the coming months and “we have to be even more conscious of our behavior.” He went on, “We have to be even more mindful and do things in a specific way. We have to double down.” He mentioned the challenges of bringing students back home from colleges and of celebrating upcoming holidays. He predicted that a vaccine will not be widely available before spring, and that the next five months would be especially challenging. Princeton Council and Princeton Mayor Liz Lempert, in their COVID-19 Update on Monday, November 2, echoed the Princeton Board of Health announcement, noting, “These actions included in Princeton’s COVID-Safe Community pledge, if committed to and followed by the large majority of our community, will have a measurable effect of decreasing exposure, infection, disease, disability, and death. While we cannot change the virus, we can and must change our behaviors to lessen its impact on ourselves and others.” Noting the onset of “COVID fatigue” and emphasizing the need for everyone to work together to combat the virus, the Princeton Board of Health added, “We all want things to be ‘normal’ again, but COVID-19 is still a threat, so when one of us engages in high-risk activity, we make it less safe for everyone else. This is why Continued on Page 11
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Wednesday, November 4, 2020
The Votes Are In; the Counting Continues The voting for Election 2020 is over, but the counting, which started ten days ago with many mail-in ballots already received, continues. By 8 p.m. last night, Tuesday, November 3, all ballots in Mercer County had been cast in the 2020 General Election. Whether mailed to the Mercer County Board of Elections or placed in drop boxes at the Princeton Municipal Center and throughout the County or delivered directly to a polling place or filled out at the polls on a provisional ballot, the votes came in in record numbers, according to Mercer County Clerk Paula Sollami Covello in a phone conversation shortly before press time Tuesday. Covello stated that the Mercer County Board of Elections would be counting for at least another week, but that her office would report preliminary numbers on their website at mercercounty.org last night after the polls closed, then again on Wednesday, November 4, on Friday, November 6, and probably on Tuesday and Thursday next week. Based on the number of mail-in ballots already received, Covello expected about 70 percent of the vote to be in and counted by last night. She noted the unusual number of people who voted in Mercer County.
“I thought 2008 was a huge turnout. I was clerk then and what a huge turnout we had. But this may surpass it.” It is not clear when final results will be declared in the state, but final vote counts in all races will not be available for at least another week, as the Board of Elections will continue to accept ballots that arrive in the mail through November 10, as long as they are postmarked by 8 p.m. November 3. The counting of provisional ballots and other ballots filed on Election Day will not
begin until November 10, after all the mailin ballots have been counted. November 20 is officially the last day to count ballots in the state, and on November 23 the results will be certified by the county clerk. In Princeton eight candidates — incumbents Beth Behrend and Michele TuckPonder and challengers Adam Bierman, Hendricks Davis, Jean Durbin, Bill Hare, Paul Johnson, and Karen Lemon — are contending for three positions, three-year terms, on the Princeton Public Schools Continued on Page 7
Council Votes to Introduce Ordinance For New Affordable Housing Zone Princeton Council voted at its Monday meeting to introduce an ordinance creating a new affordable housing zone, for a project of townhouses and multifamily apartments that backs up to the Princeton Shopping Center and has frontage on Terhune Road. The governing body also approved a resolution authorizing a settlement agreement with 375 Terhune LLC, owned by developer Roman Barsky. One house currently stands on the parcel. Both items were carried over from the Council’s meeting on October 26.
The ordinance provides a framework for the development of townhouses and multifamily apartments, 20 percent of which are designated affordable housing. There can be up to 24 townhouses and six multifamily apartments. “This attempts to create this housing in a form that is sympathetic to the existing scale of residential development along Terhune by breaking up the apartments into two buildings, appropriately scaled and set back,” said Michael Sullivan, planning consultant. “The townhomes Continued on Page 12
VOTE 2020: The Suzanne Patterson Center was one of five polling locations open in Princeton on Tuesday . This year’s General Election was primarily vote-by-mail in New Jersey due to the pandemic, but registered voters could drop off their ballots or vote by provisional ballot in-person at the polling sites . Only voters with a disability who needed an accommodation were allowed to use a machine .