By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Princeton University won a legal battle Friday when a judge threw out one of the counts in a lawsuit seeking to stop the school’s $330 million arts and transit project.
Superior Court Judge Douglas H. Hurd, sitting in Trenton, ruled there was nothing defective with the legal notice the then-Princeton Township published for the arts and transit zoning ordinance that the Township Committee adopted in 2011.
Bruce I. Afran, the attorney for a group of plaintiffs including Princeton resident Anne Neumann, had argued the notice was invalid.
Though only a procedural challenge to the ordinance, the issue was important because if the judge had agreed with Mr. Afran, his ruling would have invalidated the zoning and required the university to start over. The municipality, however, went to court seeking to have the notice issue thrown out, a victory that showed what the township had done was correct, said Princeton municipal attorney Edwin W. Schmierer in a phone interview Friday.
The township had published the full text of the arts and transit zoning ordinance including an explanatory preamble. As part of their lawsuit, opponents charged the legal notice was defective, for among other things, because it did not say where people could get a copy of the ordinance.
Richard S. Goldman, the attorney for the university, said Friday the judge’s ruling was “a very, very important outcome.” A lawyer from his firm represented the school in court.
Mr. Afran said, “We respectfully disagree with the judge’s ruling because the public notice of the time and place for the township’s arts zone ordinance was hidden beneath hundreds of lines of type in a manner that prevented most people from knowing about the hearing where the arts zone ordinance was adopted; by this strategy, instead of protecting the citizen’s rights, the township worked to insulate the university from facing opposition to its development plans.
”In any event, the ruling today affects only the issue of whether there was proper notice as to the adoption of the township’s arts zone and does not affect the other more important aspects of the case, namely whether the borough and township arts zones are illegal spot zoning that provide a private zone to one landowner, Princeton University, in violation of New Jersey law.
”Judge Hurd said today that the trial on those issues will be in September. We informed Judge Hurd today that the plaintiffs will move to block any construction before these cases are resolved.”
The judge’s decision leaves the rest of that lawsuit intact, so lawyers will have to argue that towns had acted properly in approving the rezoning. But other lawsuits are pending, including one filed this month to overturn the Planning Board approval that the university had received in December.
For its part, the university is going ahead with the project. Demolition along Alexander Street is scheduled to start this spring, with work on a new parking lot and temporary Dinky train platform due to begin in July. Construction on the three arts buildings is scheduled to start next year.
