By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
The Princeton First Aid & Rescue Squad filed plans last week with the municipality to get approval for constructing a one-story headquarters on Mount Lucas Road at Valley Road, the latest step in a 15-year-journey for PFARS to move into a new building.
The nearly 16,000-square-foot-headquarters will provide more room for a squad whose present home, on North Harrison Street, was built in 1963 at a time “when ambulances were still Cadillacs,” PFARS President Mark Freda said Tuesday.
“So just the size alone of the vehicles is much bigger, they barely fit in our current building,” he said. “Call volume is a lot higher, so we have more ambulances than we did then. We’re much busier, we have almost three thousand calls a year.”
The project, requiring a use variance and other variances, will be heard by the municipal zoning board. Freda said PFARS hopes to have a hearing before the board in December, although nothing has been scheduled yet. Attorney Chris Tarr, who has represented the likes of the Institute for Advanced Study, will be donating his time to work on the case for the squad, Freda said.
“It’s an important project for the community,” Mayor Liz Lempert said Monday. “PFARS provides an invaluable service. There’s few things that rival public safety.”
Freda called it “possible” for PFARS to break ground “somewhere between April and July,” for an anticipated 12-to 14-month-long project to build. Locating the new squad headquarters there will put PFARS near the police and fire departments, so all three agencies will be centrally located.
The project, among other things, calls for closing part of Terhune Road, according to documents PFARS filed with the town Oct. 11.
“Terhune now goes all the way through all the way to (Route) 206,” Mayor Lempert said, “but the building would be situated in that spot. It would require closing that little stretch of road.”
PFARS is raising money to pay for the roughly $7.8 million project, partly financed through PFARS selling its North Harrison Street headquarters and two other properties on Clearview Avenue to the municipality. The town already has title to the Clearview parcels, Freda said, but no money has changed hands in an overall deal expected to fetch around $1.5 million to $1.6 million. The North Harrison Street property still has to be appraised, sometime in 2018, he said.
Town officials have not decided how they intend to use those three parcels.
“We haven’t had that discussion yet,” Mayor Lempert said in calling it something that will come up in 2018.
