As the University Medical Center at Princeton vacated Princeton Borough for its new home in Plainsboro this week, residents of the neighborhood surrounding the hospital’s old home on Witherspoon Street continued to express concern about the plans for a rental community to be built in its place.

AvalonBay Communities is contracted to build 280 units at the site of the old hospital building, which is to be demolished. While the company last month withdrew its request for fewer affordable housing units in exchange for higher density, residents remain worried about what they say is a lack of public open space throughout the complex and connected to the public sidewalks, the proposed design, and the type of environmental building standards the developer wants to use.

Early this month, Princeton Citizens for Sustainable Neighborhoods wrote a letter to the UMCP and its Board of Trustees expressing its concerns. “We request UMCP to honor its own commitments to the Princeton community, expressed in the consensual Master Plan and in the Princeton Borough Code [including design standards]. The hospital must push AvalonBay, or any developer, towards a design that fully reflects the hospital’s own goals,” the four-page letter reads. “UMCP cannot ethically allow devastation to follow in the wake of its departure from the Witherspoon campus.”

On Tuesday, UMCP’s Princeton Healthcare Systems responded with the following statement:

“Princeton HealthCare System cares deeply about the communities it serves and we are closely following the events surrounding the re-use of our former Witherspoon Street campus. Our contract with AvalonBay Communities (ABC) for the sale of the Witherspoon Street property gives them the right to seek governmental approvals as they deem appropriate. A process exists and is underway to evaluate ABC’s proposal. We believe the process should be allowed to follow its course and to do its work. Based on our many years of experience working with the Borough and the Township on our hospital replacement project, we are confident that the officials and the staff in both communities, working with ABC, will reach a good outcome.”

Alexi Assmus, who co-wrote the letter to the hospital, said members of the group had met informally with a hospital representative and were cordially received. “We would like to have a meeting with Barry Rabner [the hospital’s CEO] to discuss the details in the letter regarding the fact that the plans for the AvalonBay site do not follow Borough code or the town’s master plan, and that the master plan was created by the hospital along with municipal representatives and neighborhood representatives and the greater Princeton community between 2004 and 2006,” she said. “What we’d like to know is how the hospital can meet that commitment to that, given where we are now. And we’d like to discuss the details of what was actually understood and written up in the Borough code and master plan.”

Ms. Assmus said Princeton Citizens for Sustainable Neighborhoods is seeking independent legal counsel to get an opinion on whether the division of the Borough code which applies to design standards is enforceable or not.

Meanwhile, an ad hoc subcommittee including Council members Kevin Wilkes, Jenny Crumiller, and Mayor Yina Moore; William Wolfe of the Site Plan Review Advisory Board (SPRAB), Heidi Fichtenbaum of the Princeton Environmental Council, and neighborhood resident Joseph Weiss has met to discuss the issues and will reconvene next week. Mayor Moore was scheduled to deliver a progress report at the meeting of Borough Council last night.

“We met first only as a subcommittee, and then we met twice after that with the developer,” Mayor Moore said Tuesday. “We’ll have another meeting next week. I think with the good will of the landowner, the prospective developer, and citizens who are interested in contributing to the formulation of positive ideas and a spirit of cooperation, we can get somewhere.”

Ron Ladell, AvalonBay’s Senior Vice President of Development, said meetings have been “incredibly productive and positive. There are quite a few members of that committee and they represent a diverse group of interests and backgrounds. That’s very helpful to us as a developer, and we think the interaction will result in a project that will be designed in a manner Princeton residents will appreciate.”