By Lea Kahn, Staff Writer
The Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.’s request to amend the preliminary site plan for a portion of a planned office park, located on the corner of Princeton Pike and Lewisville Road, will be considered by the Planning Board when it meets Monday night.
The Planning Board will meet at 7 p.m. in the lower level conference room at the Municipal Building. The pharmaceutical company’s request is the only development application item on the board’s agenda.
Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. is seeking permission to change the parking arrangements from three- and four-level parking garages to ground-level parking lots. The number of parking spaces also would be reduced from 3,350 in the garages to and few “surface” parking spaces, to 2,328 in the parking lots.
The application involves phase 1 if the planned office park, which was approved by the Planning Board in 2000 but it was never built. The first phase of the office park consists of nearly 611,000 square feet of office space in five buildings, plus parking.
Township planners gave preliminary site plan approval for a 1.5-million-square-foot office park on the 135-acre parcel to RCN, a cable and Internet service provider, in 2000. The company received final approval for the first phase of the office park a few months later. It would have been the largest office park in Lawrence Township.
The property was acquired by Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. in 2001 after RCN went out of business. The company ran into financial difficulties before it could begin construction and sold the land to Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. for $40 million. A spokesman at the time said the pharmaceutical company bought the site to address its future expansion needs.
But those plans changed when the pharmaceutical company gained approval from the Hopewell Township Planning Board to expand its facility there, and the company listed the parcel for sale in 2006. There have been no buyers for the property, and the for-sale sign remains in place.

