Ellisdale Road to get school

New middle school will be built on Ellisdale Road in Upper Freehold.

By: Lauren Burgoon
   UPPER FREEHOLD — Months of speculation are over and it’s now official — 46 acres along Ellisdale Road will house the new middle school at a price tag of $2.6 million.
   The school board unanimously voted on Jan. 19 to approve a letter of intent for purchasing the land. The $2.6 million cost represents land cost plus compensatory money for what the owners would have made from the land. The site currently is owned by Crosswicks Farms and used as an active tree farm for Princeton Nurseries.
   Superintendent Bob Connelly said that the price "is within the district’s budget for the referendum and also may provide some contingency after the testing, surveys and fencing of the property are completed."
   The district plans to close on the land in five months after additional environmental tests.
   "This ends a long and sometime arduous situation with finding land within the township to build a new middle school," school board member Donald Lilley said at the meeting, expressing relief that the end is in sight.
   One of the main concerns during the land search was that the Ellisdale Road site owners were not willing sellers, but that wasn’t true by the end of negotiations, board member Howard Krieger said.
   "Negotiations went better than we thought with the cooperation of Princeton Nurseries," he said.
   Mr. Krieger characterized the talks as "amiable," despite the unwilling seller rumors.
   The land search was certainly long with an extra kink thrown in right before the December referendum where voters narrowly approved the $38.9 million project. The Board of Education began its search for possible sites more than 18 months ago. Allentown was immediately disregarded because the borough didn’t have any sites available with the minimum acreage requirement.
   That left Upper Freehold, which has a lot of open space but also a lot of wetlands. The district eventually identified 10 possible sites, which were crossed off one by one as test results proved them unusable for various reasons. The search was made harder because Upper Freehold’s Master Plan revisions did not include a provision to set aside land for schools.
   The district set its sight on a Walnford Road site also used by Princeton Nurseries but currently not farmed. The site didn’t pass environmental tests, which left the district looking at the Ellisdale Road location. That was the site listed on the referendum question.
   In the weeks before the vote there was speculation that committeeman and Cream Ridge Golf Club owner Bill Miscoski might donate 50 acres of his land on Route 539 to the district for the middle school if the town approved a new active adult community for whatever portion of the land remained unused by the school. Some people saw the offer as an attempt to thwart the referendum, which Mr. Miscoski denied.
   At the Jan. 19 meeting the board’s land attorney said that any new sites would require environmental testing and approvals and wouldn’t allow the district to open the school by target date of September 2007.
   "The generous offer from Cream Ridge does not meet the timelines of the middle school construction. However, the Board of Education would entertain an offer of land as a future school site," Dr. Connelly wrote in an e-mail to The Messenger-Press this week.