Local businessman Peter Marks has announced he will run for mayor in the Republican primary this June. Mr. Marks is the only candidate so far to challenge the incumbent, Democratic Mayor Liz Lempert, who will run for a second term in the November general election.

“I’m running because I was asked to run,” said Mr. Marks, who has made two unsuccessful tries for seats on the governing body. “I agreed, because it offers a platform to initiate or expand a discussion that the town needs to have, that seems to have been engaged in by a relatively small number of people.”

Raised in Princeton, Mr. Marks, who is a commercial real estate developer, lives in the Moore Street house where he grew up. Zoning is among his biggest concerns, specifically as it affects the changing character of the downtown.

“Related to this is the discussion of the operating budget, which is what gives us our property taxes,” he said. “The influence that Council should or shouldn’t have over the school system, the county expenditures, the rules that the state imposes С it’s a big package.”

Also prominent on Mr. Marks’s list is the way pensions are handled. “It seems to me one possibility is some sort of negotiated transition, on terms that the recipients find acceptable, replacing a refined benefit plan with a refined contribution plan,” he said.

Mr. Marks believes consolidation has not produced the results many expected. “Whatever its merits, I think it was sold on the wrong basis,” he said. “It was sold as a means of controlling expenditures. From my little vantage point at Moore and Hawthorne streets, it seems this has been by cutting back services in the former Borough that the Borough could have cut back itself. If we wanted less frequent leaf and brush removal or less frequent snow removal, we could have voted for it. If we wanted to substitute large quantities of salt for snow plowing, we could have voted for that.”

The AvalonBay rental complex rising on the site of the former Princeton Hospital is another concern. “I was not happy with the decision to rezone the hospital site to permit what we’ve ultimately been saddled with, which is a five-story wooden structure that is a potential fire hazard,” he said. “It sets a zoning precedent that is difficult to escape. I am also one of those people who think the truncated Dinky station was silly, particularly at a time when people are eager to increase opportunities for public transportation.”

In the upcoming election, two seats on Princeton Council are up for grabs. Members of the Princeton Democratic Municipal Committee voted to recommend to the Mercer County Democratic Chair that incumbent Jenny Crumiller and former school board president Tim Quinn have the slogan “Regular Democratic Organization” on the ballot, since they received the most votes. Also running are Leticia Fraga and Anne Neumann.

Campaigning for the top office, Mr. Marks said he wants to take part in public forums. “I hope that some of them are in neighborhood settings,” he said. “I hope all of them can last long enough that people from the audience can ask as many questions as they want, and don’t need to be filtered through a moderator. And maybe we’ll get an interchange that makes people begin to think about alternate possibilities. Maybe we’ll find that the current way is the way to go. I don’t think so. But I don’t claim to have all the answers.”