BUILDING “A MORE TRANSPARENT, ACCOUNTABLE GOVERNMENT”: Gov. Mikie Sherrill, left, joined a panel of state, county, and municipal officials August 5 at the Arts Council of Princeton for “Visions for the Future of New Jersey and What Can Mercer County Do,” part of the Joint Effort Safe Streets series of events celebrating the history and contributions of the Witherspoon-Jackson community. (Photo by Matthew Hersh)
By Matthew Hersh
State and local leaders joined Gov. Mikie Sherrill last week to grapple with the complex relationships that need to exist between state and local governments to pursue equity without treating communities as separate silos.
Held August 5 at the Arts Council of Princeton as part of the annual nine-day Joint Effort Princeton Witherspoon-Jackson Community Safe Streets Summer Program, the Jim Floyd Memorial Community Discussion was titled “Visions for the Future of New Jersey and What Can Mercer County Do.” The conversation, which included Sherrill, Mercer County Executive Dan Benson, Princeton Mayor Mark Freda, state Sen. Andrew Zwicker, Mercer County Commissioner Sam Frisby, former Trenton Mayor Douglas Palmer, African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey CEO John Harmon, and Mercer County Commissioner candidate Nakia White-Barr, ranged from affordable housing and economic opportunity to racial disparities, Trenton’s finances, and the mundane business of sharing government services.
Communities may face very different challenges, but their futures are interconnected, panelists concluded.
“Here’s my vision: In short, driving costs down, lifting every community up, and building a more transparent, accountable government that helps us do both,” Sherrill said, pointing to initiatives involving utility costs, affordable housing, education, minority- and women-owned businesses, and government permitting. In Mercer County, she highlighted the state’s NJ Homes Affordable Building Club — which includes Princeton, Pennington, and Trenton — as well as a plan with New Jersey Transit to build 20,000 homes near transit hubs on underused state-owned property.
But Sherrill also emphasized the everyday, long-term challenge of making government work better and cited Mercer County as a leader in shared services, and said her administration would provide more support for municipalities and counties that collaborate.
“I ran for governor to shake up the status quo,” she said. “You don’t want strongly worded letters or 10-year studies. You want action. You want results,” said Sherrill.
Inter-government collaboration became a recurring theme throughout the discussion.
Benson said the county’s role is not simply to deliver services, but to facilitate cooperation among municipalities and elevate local concerns to the state.
“There is this symbiosis that comes from a new county administration working with a new state administration, he said. “It’s about collaboration, it’s about facilitation, but it’s also about elevating issues to the state.”
Freda offered a local example by way of Princeton’s consolidation, where the Municipality now has 14 joint departments through their consolidated government services. The experience, he said, gives Princeton a perspective it can share as the state looks for opportunities to expand regional cooperation.
“Mayors and elected officials at the municipal level, and at the county level, see things and understand things that the governor and her staff are going to look at differently,” said Freda. “So as long as there’s a dialogue, we can all work together.”
But collaboration alone does not erase the differences among communities.
Frisby cited a 2023 report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on health and racial equity in New Jersey, which examines how where people live can affect their health outcomes and calls for policies that address the effects of generations of discriminatory practices while expanding opportunity across communities. The report points to factors including housing, education, employment and access to health care as important determinants
of health.
Frisby offered a striking local illustration. He said life expectancy in Trenton is 73 years compared with 87 years in Princeton, roughly six miles away.
“Six miles is not equating 14,” Frisby said.
The disparity, he argued, underscores why Mercer’s municipalities and county government need to align their efforts so that resources can go farther and communities can move forward together.
Palmer, who served as Trenton’s mayor from 1990 to 2010, was more direct about what he believes that should mean for the state capital.
He called for a “Marshall Plan” of $50 million a year for 10 years for Trenton, with funds directed toward reducing Trenton’s property-tax burden. The city, he said, bears an unusually heavy fiscal burden because so much state property is located there but does not contribute to the local tax base.
Trenton, Palmer said, has had 10 governors since he first became mayor, yet still faces a poverty rate of roughly 30 percent.
“I had never been more optimistic about Trenton’s future as right now,” said Palmer. But optimism, he added, has to be accompanied by action.
A stronger Trenton is not simply a Trenton issue, Palmer said. “You cannot have a strong Mercer County, you cannot have a strong Princeton, unless you have a strong Trenton.”
Harmon approached the same challenge from the perspective of Black businesses.
Black Americans, he said, continue to face significant disparities in wealth, home ownership, and business ownership. The African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey, he said, has sought to address those disparities through partnerships with corporations and banks.
“We didn’t come hat in hand,” Harmon said. “We came to create a strategic partnership for the greater good of the state of New Jersey.”
He called for an intentional partnership between the chamber and the Sherrill administration to connect the state with Black-owned businesses and help them gain access to resources and opportunities.
Zwicker similarly connected the broad discussion of equity to a very local question: affordable housing.
Princeton, he said, offers an example of what can happen when a community chooses to embrace affordable housing instead of resisting it. The Princeton Shopping Center, he noted, is now fully occupied in part because the town had the foresight to incorporate housing, including affordable housing, in an area where people want to live.
“When people live in the spaces where they work, where they want community, there’s an economic development activity that benefits everybody,” Zwicker said.
Zwicker also highlighted a $400,000 grant to the Paul Robeson House included in Sherrill’s first budget, calling attention to the importance of preserving the history of one of Princeton’s most prominent figures.
For White-Barr, the challenge is to make sure Trenton is understood not simply as the location of the New Jersey State House, but as a community in its own right.
When people say “Trenton,” she said, “they’re talking about that building that they work in downtown on that little block of West State Street, not the community, more broadly.”
Changing that rhetoric, she said, is part of changing how people think about the region.
John Bailey, a Princeton native and founder of Joint Effort Safe Streets, has returned each summer for decades to organize the program’s youth sports, community discussions, and events celebrating the history and contributions of the Witherspoon-Jackson community.
He opened the evening by looking backward as a way of thinking about what comes next.
Baily spoke about the importance of knowing what happened, when it happened, what happened, and to whom it happened. Only by being “authentic and transparent with ourselves, our neighbors, the community that we’re in,” he said, can people move forward.
Sherrill returned to that ideal, noting a shared obligation to understand history and address the disparities it has produced to find practical ways to make government and communities work together.
The challenge now, she said, is turning that alignment into action.
“We know it starts in our state capital, in our capital county,” Sherrill said. “And we have so much exciting work to do together.”
The event was held as part of Pat Fisher Day and coincided with the opening of the Pat Fisher Memorial Exhibition at the Arts Council of Princeton. It also included the presentation of two Mildred Trotman Community Service Awards: one to the Sankofa Stitchers Modern Quilt Guild and the other to the Ubuntu Cultural Pavilion of Somerville, which showcases the life, activism, and legacy of Paul Robeson.