Residents of South Post Road who have battled Mercer County Community College’s plans for a 45-acre solar field have taken the fight to court. A lawsuit on behalf of the West Windsor Residents’ Association was filed by attorney David J. Reich of the Bernardsville firm of Shain, Schaffer, & Rafanello, on Wednesday, August 22. It alleges that the $38 million project, which would be the largest solar installation at a North American college, should have been presented before West Windsor’s planning board and zoning board of adjustment. The lawsuit seeks an injunction to halt construction of the solar field, scheduled for late September, until reviews at the township level occur. The first court date is scheduled for Thursday, September 20.
Residents say they had little opportunity to voice their concerns at a formal review. Only a handful of people attended the Mercer County Planning Board meeting in Trenton where the project was approved.
Over the past six months South Post Road residents including Jim Vizzoni, Teresa Lourenco, Marilyn Mangone-Stoddard, Carol Wake, Nicole Miller, Richard Campbell, and others expressed their displeasure about the lack of communication from stakeholders including the college, the Mercer County Improvement Authority, and SunLight General Mercer Solar. West Windsor Township is named as a defendant in the lawsuit.
In their suit the residents claim that they face irreparable harm. “Unless defendants are enjoined, the precise evil the residents seek to prevent — the building of a massive solar panel project without any local oversight — will occur. There will be no way to undo the harm created short of requiring demolition of the panels and restoration of the fallow farm land on which the panels are to be built to the condition it was in before construction started.”
Residents could never be compensated for harm they will suffer, the suit adds, because “harm is generally considered irreparable in equity if it cannot be redressed adequately by monetary damages.”
The residents’ lawsuit references to a similar case in which solar panels were erected at Rutgers University (Rutgers v. Piluso). Student housing was impacted by the project, but because student housing is linked to the educational mission of Rutgers, the courts found the school to have immunity from local zoning authority. The West Windsor residents’ suit states that immunity is not warranted in the case of MCCC because the erection of 45 acres of solar panels “has very little, if anything, to do with the college’s educational purpose.”
The suit also examines West Windsor’s land use ordinance and the specifics of “accessory use” in relation to educational activities for which the college’s property is designated. The residents claim that the ordinance was not intended to accommodate this solar project.
“A review of the township’s land use ordinance provision containing the zoning criteria for the educational zone (where the college is located) indicates that it was last amended in 1985. The township did not even think about authorizing solar panels as a permitted accessory use that long ago,” the suit states.
West Windsor’s zoning attorney, Ed Schmierer, was quoted in the press as saying that the proposed solar farm was a permitted accessory use for land zoned for educational use, so MCCC did not need to present to project before any local boards or request any variances.
