By Frank Mustac, Contributor
A rule governing rooftop slopes of new houses built in the municipality was taken off the books after a unanimous vote by the Borough Council on Monday., A recommendation to eliminate the rule was based on input from various architects, according to Councilwoman Deborah Gnatt., “The suggestion was that the existing ordinance created too much restriction for architectural creativity in town,” she said., Eric Holtermann, chairman of the Pennington Borough Historic Preservation Commission, said the rooftop slope ordinance was having “an unfortunate affect on every new house that was built in town.”, New houses, he said, have their roof gable facing the street and never have it run with the street, which is the traditional pattern of the houses that were built in Pennington., Holtermann, an architect with HMR Architects in Princeton, spoke at the Borough Council meeting on March 6, where he also delivered report on the activities of Historic Preservation Commission during 2016., Pennington has a historic preservation ordinance in place that governs design aspects of houses and buildings in the borough’s historic district., There were only a few applications submitted in 2016 to perform work in the historic district, Holtermann said., “There is nothing wrong with that,” he said. “It means the ordinance is working kind of the way it was expected to – people are not asking for lots of little changes.”, According to Holtermann, there weren’t as many application for major work in the historic district last year., “Since the implementation of the historic preservation ordinance, there are five houses in town in the historic district that have not been demolished, that might otherwise had been demolished, that have since been restored or are in the process of being restored and reused – and that is through the ordinance.”, There have been, however, an increase of inquires about solar panels, Holtermann said., “In some other towns, historic reservation commissions do not allow solar panels,” he said. “We actually encourage it.”, Holtermann said the idea of bringing solar panel technology to some of the older parts of town was a “good thing environmentally” thanks to solar panels’ “changeable technology” that only gets better with time., “The purpose of our ordinance is to protect the primary historic structures and allow people to make those kinds of modifications,” he said., The Historic Preservation Commission, Holtermann said, has digitized texts chronicling of the histories of the roughly 160 houses and buildings in the historic district. The histories, or “surveys” as Holtermann calls them, were written on a typewriter in 1985., “We really feel like we have a good base for a survey of the entire historic district, which we plan to use moving forward when applying for grants,” Holtermann said. “Also, we’re looking at putting the survey information on the borough website so that people can actually look up their own properties.”, The idea behind the directory, he said, was to help any homeowner find out more about their homes and their homes’ histories., “They are creating a directory so any homeowner would be able to go on the Pennington Borough website, go to historic preservation, go to this survey and go right to their house and learn about the history of their house,” he said. “In most cases, you get some pretty interesting and some pretty good history of those houses, which I think in many cases people are not aware of.”
