As the fall semester approaches the 45-acre solar field at Mercer County Community College is scheduled for work, with a groundbreaking ceremony planned for later this year. But residents of South Post Road are still trying to appeal to the township, their fellow citizens, and anyone who will listen to support their efforts to halt the $38 million project in their backyard.
At the August 6 Council meeting, Teresa Lourenco and Nicole Miller of South Post Road each urged Council to continue the fight alongside them. Lourenco held up signs that read “Stop Solar Sprawl” and “Shame on MCCC” as she spoke during public comments.
“We hired an attorney and we’ve sent letters to the township to let you (Council) know that the township has rights to challenge something like this. The land is zoned for educational use, and MCCC certainly could not build a car wash or nuclear power plant there if they wanted to — there’s limits to their rights to build things. Certainly an industrial-scale solar project stretches the limits of those rights,” Miller said.
Her husband Doug also asked Council to take action. “If I were a naive person, I would say something like ‘if this were in your backyard, you would be working harder to prevent this.’ But it would never be in your backyard because long before it reaches this level it would have been squashed. Your job is to look out of us, please look out for us,” he said.
But the answers they received at the Council meeting were less than encouraging. Councilman Bryan Maher said it is frustrating that, despite the township’s actions — including a letter sent from Mayor Hsueh and Council President Kamal Khanna (WW-P News, July 20) — MCCC continues to push ahead with the project.
“We as a Council with the mayor’s support, have sent our displeasure with this to virtually everybody in state government with really no response,” Maher said.
Because he also represents the Mercer County Board of Chosen Freeholders, Township Attorney Michael Herbert could not be involved in any efforts to communicate the township’s position with Mercer County officials.
He advised Council members that both the county attorney and West Windsor’s Zoning Board Attorney, Edwin Schmierer, had worked on researching some legal paths for the township but had not found any. Herbert acknowledged that the communications had only taken place over the phone and were not documented, and Maher along with Council Vice President Linda Geevers asked him to supply official memos concerning the matter.
Maher later told Council that when he took his son to a wrestling camp at the Rutgers campus in Piscataway, he saw solar panels that looked good covering a parking lot, protecting cars.
“As I looked at it I thought why aren’t we (MCCC) doing this? Why is Rutgers doing this and yet we are destroying farmland to put a solar farm?” he asked.
