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Modeled on the national Mayors’ Institute on City Design, the New Jersey Institute provides a multi-day retreat for six mayors and a resource team of design and planning professionals. The mayors present planning and design issues that each community is facing, and then participate in a wide-ranging discussion. While addressing the specific concerns raised by the mayors, the resource team members also describe in broader terms how they have approached similar problems. Using examples from other communities, the mayors and resource team members learn from each other.

The Mayors’ Institute offers public officials the rare opportunity to discuss a planning issue facing their communities with a group of peers and some of the most respected designers and planners in the country. These institutes focus particular attention on the relationship between community planning and public health, and how better design and development can create healthy, livable communities. Experts in public health participate in the Institute discussions, providing presentations and analyses of how alternative development patterns impact the health of communities.

This N.J. Mayors’ Institute program was held at Princeton University on October 20th – 23rd, 2005. Organized specifically for neighboring towns along the West Trenton Rail Corridor (also know as the Somerset-Mercer Extension), this special Mayors’ Institute focused on opportunities for better land-use planning and design in anticipation of potential reactivation of passenger rail service on the West Trenton Line. This Institute focused particular attention on the challenges and opportunities such transit service poses for these municipalities, as well as how changes in zoning, planning and design guidelines can generate the ridership necessary to support mass transit, while preserving the unique character of each community. Prior to the Institute, RPA and the Municipal Land Use Center at the College of New Jersey held a meeting of mayors to review federal and state procedures for considering passenger rail reactivation, as well as prepare the mayors for planning and design considerations at the Institute.