LAWRENCE: Planning Board to consider day-care center proposal

By Lea Kahn, Staff Writer
   A proposal to convert a single-family house at 22 Fackler Road into a day-care center tops the Planning Board’s agenda Monday, when it meets at 7 p.m. in the lower level conference room at the Municipal Building.
   The application, submitted by Asim Mufti, was slated to be heard at the board’s July and August meetings, but it was postponed to respond to comments from the Planning Board’s planning consultant.
   A day-care center is considered a conditional use in the Enviromental Protection-2 residential zone. The proposal meets all of the standards for a conditional use except for parking lot landscaping for the 17-space parking lot.
   The minor site plan application calls for moving an outbuilding and attaching it to the main house, and also for opening up the first floor of the house and reconfiguring it into several daycare classrooms. There would be offices on the second floor.
   There could be as many as 65 children enrolled in the day-care center, which is located on the corner of Fackler Road and Princeton Pike. The property was developed for a single-family house, but it was most recently used as a veterinarian’s office.
   In other business, the Planning Board is expected to consider an application from Rider University, which is seeking preliminary and final site plan approval to build a 7,000-square-foot indoor training facility for baseball batting practice.
   The building would be attached to an existing maintenance building, near the varsity baseball field on campus. The interior of the proposed building would contain batting cages and a synthetic turf field, according to a report prepared by Planning Board consultants Philip Caton and Brian Slaugh.
   The closest residential uses that are not on campus are more than 1,800 feet away. The building would not be visible in both summer and winter from off-campus passersby, Mr. Caton and Mr. Slaugh wrote.