Millstone planners OK special meeting for solar farm project

Error in published notice put project at risk to meet deadline for federal funds

BY JANE MEGGITT Correspondent

MILLSTONE — Enough members of the Planning Board to ensure a quorum agreed to attend a special meeting Dec. 22 so that the developer of a solar energy farm can have the application for preliminary and final approval heard before a Dec. 31 deadline.

At the Dec. 8 meeting, attorney Kenneth Pape, representing North Park Solar Energy Farm, asked the board to consider his request for the special meeting.

Pape said the published notice he sent out for the meeting that night was incomplete, and a crucial sentence was inadvertently left out. Planning Board Attorney Michael Steib pointed out to Pape that the board could not take jurisdiction due to the error. Pape asked that the board consider a special meeting, and he would absorb all expenses to the municipality.

He said that the federal stimulus bill is awarding grants of up to 30 percent of the estimated $65 million to $80 million that it will cost to develop a solar farm, but the deadline for an approved application, along with some form of groundbreaking, is Dec. 31.

“We recognize that asking the board and its professionals to convene between now and the end of the year is an imposition,” he said. “We realize a special meeting is not [automatically] granting approval. We must earn approval.”

Chairman Mitchell Newman noted that the board had fewer meetings this year due to lack of proposed projects. He polled the board members as to their availability for a Dec. 22 meeting. While some members said they could not attend the meeting, board member David Kurzman said that while he was going to be out of town, he would fly back to make the meeting.

The proposed solar farm is located on a 130-acre parcel in the business park zone on North Disbrow Hill Road. Pape said the landlocked property, located behind the Moto Industrial Park, is currently farmed. For the solar farm, his client intends to install “hundreds of thousands” of solar panels on metal frames to collect sunlight that is sent through inverters into the grid to produce electricity.

“It’s an unusual project. There’s no parking lot, drainage or building,” he said.

Pape said his client is working with the Freehold Soil Conservation District to come up with right grass mix to plant under the solar panels.

Township Engineer Matt Shafai said that no grading is planned for the fields, and that all the proposed solar panels would be placed within the existing farm fields.