11-year battle comes to an end
By Lea Kahn
The Cellco Partnership’s 11-year battle to place a cell tower on the Peterson’s Nursery property on Route 206 at Province Line Road came to an end Wednesday night as the Zoning Board of Adjustment approved a use variance to allow the tower.
The Cellco Partnership has been in and out of court over the use variance since 1999. The zoning board denied the initial use variance request in 1999 and also denied a revised use variance application in 2007.
A use variance is needed because a cell tower is not a permitted use in the Environmental Protection-1 residential zone. The Peterson’s Nursery property at 3730 Lawrenceville Road also known as Route 206 is located in the EP-1 zone.
With the use variance in its pocket, the Cellco Partnership plans to return to the zoning board, possibly as soon as February, to seek site plan approval. It was agreed to bifurcate the application, which means the applicant would seek permission for the use variance first and then return with a site plan if the variance was approved.
The Zoning Board of Adjustment was ordered to reconsider the Cellco Partnership’s use variance application without considering a township-owned property on Carter Road by a three-judge panel of the Appellate Division of Mercer County state Superior Court in September.
The Cellco Partnership/Verizon Wireless and New Cingular Wireless PCS LLC sued the zoning board in March 2008 after it refused to grant the use variance to allow construction of a proposed 140-foot-tall tower on the Peterson’s Nursery property.
But Mercer County state Superior Court Judge Linda Feinberg dismissed the lawsuit in April 2009. She wrote that a 2-acre parcel on Carter Road, which was offered as an alternate site at the zoning board’s last public hearing on the Cellco application on Dec. 19, 2007, “would be as an effective if not more effective alternate means of filling the coverage gap.”
The zoning board denied the Cellco Partnership’s use variance application because of the possibility that the Carter Road site which is owned by Lawrence Township wold be available as an alternate site.

