READINGTON TWP. | Despite objections from the owners of Solberg Airport, township officials this week passed an ordinance they say brings them into compliance with state safety and zoning regulations.

Officials say it provides standards for safety, land use and development controls within and around the airport. They say it embraces the airport and offers benefits such as a museum, restaurant and flight school.

Airport owners argue the new ordinance wrongly presumes the township has the right to take the property.

"It's a way to hem in and constrain the airport in a manner which will ultimately result, in all likelihood, in its demise," Solberg attorney Laurence Orloff said Friday.

Orloff also said he plans to "file suit attacking the validity of the ordinance."

Amid fear of an airport expansion, township officials last year began a bitterly contested eminent domain proceeding to acquire about 624 acres around the airport and the development rights to the about 101 acre airport. A judge stayed the case and discovery is due in August.

In a countersuit the Solberg family, the airport's owners, filed in October, Orloff points out officials failed to comply with state safety and zoning regulations. In a letter airport owners submitted to the township committee this week, airport owners accuse officials of dodging compliance for more than 20 years.

They are "choosing now to enact the ordinance only after it purports to restrict the size of the airport property" and after being sued for long-standing violation, they wrote.

"To those who say the township is intent on destroying the airport, nothing could be further from the truth," Mayor Gerard Shamey said.

Officials considered the ordinance off and on for years, and a recent letter from state Department of Transportation Commissioner Kris Kolluri helped them with a sticking point with which they had dealt.

They sought a definition of "routine improvements," which, according to Kolluri's letter, does not refer to additions to operational surfaces such as runways.

Changes of that magnitude would go before the appropriate township board for consideration, he said.

Reporter Andrea Eilenberger can be reached at 610-258-7171 or by e-mail at aeilenberger@express-times.com.

© 2007 The Express-Times. Used by NJ.com with permission.

Date: June 9, 2007 Source: NJ.com
URL: http://www.nj.com/news/expresstimes/nj/index.ssf?/base/news-5/1181362039246160.xml&coll=2