By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
One vote kept Princeton from having what would have been the first bed and breakfast in the community, in a defeat for a Cherry Hill Road woman interested in opening the business., Laura Edwards needed to get municipal zoning board approval to be able to use two bedrooms in her four-bedroom home and put two bedrooms in an old horse barn behind the residence that she would have renovated. Princeton, however, does not permit bed and breakfasts, so she needed a use variance from the board to let her open for business., But she fell one vote shy of the five votes she needed after a hearing last week. “It was close,” Ms. Edwards said Wednesday standing outside her house., Ms. Edwards, whose late husband, Michael, had operated a travel agency in town, said she had conceived of the idea and been working on it for two years. At 70, she said it is getting harder for her to manage her 4 1/2-acre property she has owned for the past 35 years, located in a wooded section of town where deer and other wild animals roam., Her thought was to have her son, now living in southern California, move back in, and the business would be a new venture for her. She said she likes to stay in bed and breakfasts when she travels, enjoying the social aspect that goes along with it., Some of her neighbors, Sonja and Paul Lips and Le Tao and Xuejun Xu, who live behind and to the right of her, respectively, raised objections to the town on the grounds it would cause traffic problems, hurt property values, impact the privacy of neighbors, among other concerns., “In our investigation, we have found that it is not only the bordering neighbors who oppose the opening of a bed and breakfast, but also many of the surrounding neighbors,” the two couples wrote to the zoning board in seeking to defeat the project., Princeton municipal zoning officer Derek Bridger said Wednesday that Ms. Edwards’ proposal needed a use variance to permit a commercial use in a residentially zoned section of town. He said he is not aware of any bed and breakfast operating in the municipality, a business that the town does not permit., To get approval, Ms. Edwards had to get five zoning board members to support her application, but only got four. Mr. Bridger said an approval of her case would have set a precedent in the community, and offered that “anytime you introduce a commercial use in a residential zone, it’s a tough slog.”, For her part, Ms. Edwards said she was “disappointed” in last’s week outcome and does not know what her next steps will be. She said she didn’t realize that her proposal “was going to be that big of a deal.”
