In the Public Interest? Living in Harms Way, at Public Expense, and in Perpetuity, No Less…

Today, we have a guest post by my good friend and former colleague, Bill Neil.

Bill was the Director of Conservation, NJ Audubon Society and NJ Coastal Coordinator, American Littoral Society, from 1988-2001.

In a letter to Legislators, Bill explains why an important bill that is up today in Trenton is in the public interest. NJ is an anomaly in providing a statutory “right to- rebuild” storm damaged properties. The bill would revoke that “right”.

Enjoy it and realize how much we’ve lost with Bill’s departure. [Note: I took the liberty to edit with links to the bill and a NY Times book review].

Dear Chairman Smith and Senator Barnes:

I write in support of S-62, which would overturn the guaranteed right of affected property owners to rebuild in the wake of a natural disaster. Instead, destroyed or damaged homeowners would have to apply for a permit from the NJDEP, subject to the publicly vetted regulations which might deny, or allow rebuilding, with conditions rooted in science and historical records.   I also support a proposed logical amendment to make the comparable change to the Flood Hazard Area Control Act, an amendment which is based on solid evidence of where, and how frequently, structures are damaged, indicating this is not just a coastal problem.

Please note, for the record, that I was the lead negotiator for the New Jersey and national environmental groups seeking passage of Governor Thomas Kean’s coastal reform bill in 1988-1989, including a Coastal Commission,  when I worked for the American Littoral Society, then under the Direction of the late Dery Bennett. Dery was, without much exaggeration, the “soul” of state and national coastal conservation efforts, and he felt very strongly that preventing an “absolute right to rebuild” for coastal properties destroyed or damaged 50% or more, was a key, core component of any worthy coastal legislation. On that matter, we parted ways with Governor Kean.

In his recent book, “Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time,” [ see NY Times review] Columbia University professor of political science and history Ira Katznelson made a very telling observation about the nature of the American state and legislative process that developed in the wake of the New Deal, what has been described as “pluralist interest group bargaining” but which Katznelson refines to a “pluralist model of procedural politics.” He goes on to give a powerful description of what was more deeply at stake, and I think the parallels are clear for the matters in this bill.  The passages are from the Chapter entitled “Public Procedures, Private Interests”:

But just as planned administrative economic management or corporate forms of political negotiations do not come without cost, neither did this pluralist model of procedural politics.  Unchecked by the pursuit of a public interest, its formal neutrality opened the state to the distortions of private power.  The new public philosophy of group competition abdicated any democratic, as distinct from dictatorial, notions of a civic interest.  Placed under great stress, public authority to achieve common goals thus lacked means to articulate why private interests should not dominate decision making about public policy.

The resulting contest veered between an open and fair competition and a game with skewed rules and a syntax of inequality.  The more diffuse an interest – that is, the more civic and public – the less it could be served by this organization of political influence.  With planning replaced by bargaining, government, too, often came to be ‘captured by too-narrow a range of interests.

In the matter at hand, there is a clear and powerful case to be made that the public interest is being obscured, even though now it is  backed by repeated multi-billion dollar injections of federal money for disaster relief and aid to property owners, and to past and future defensive measures at the coast (and elsewhere), including the nation’s most expensive beach replenishment program.  Science tells us that the costs of defending private building interests at the coast will be going up, not down, due to rising sea levels and more intense storms, thanks to global warming. And let’s not forget that there is an additional cost to this physical situation: the costs of defending the private and public infrastructure that makes this living arrangement possible. The new scientific reality of global warning must be added to the long historical record of damage at the coast due to hurricanes (and inland flooding too, along Raritan Bay, the Passaic River…and other locales noted for repeated immersions) which, even hundreds of years before the global warming factor, tended to have long term but predictable cycles…and New Jersey and New York were  overdue…

Let us be clear, and let me be blunt about what the defenders of the status quo at the coast, and elsewhere, are demanding, enshrined very well in the existing”guaranteed right to rebuild” provision:  they are asking for unlimited federal and state dollars to defend their right to build, and re-build in demonstrably dangerous places, documented not in environmental imaginations or “planner’s projections” but by the boundaries drawn in reality by nature herself.  Or by acts of God, if you would prefer.  And they want that right to continue in perpetuity.   In their best case, they claim that the gold mine which is the NJ coast pays for itself, which conveniently ignores the fact that it could continue to due so, assuming that claim might be true,  at a much safer distance from the danger zones, ones which will continue to expand and encroach upon human property lines. And claim human lives as well.

Has their ever been a clearer case of the public interest being overwhelmed by a tiny minority of  wealthy property owners, tempered by the acknowledged fact that there are clearly some much poorer citizens also in harm’s way?  And this despite the fact that the public interest side is fully willingly to make the distressed parties “whole,” including relocation expenses.

Thank you for your time and attention to this important matter, of interest to citizens everywhere, not just New Jersey.

Sincerely,

William R. Neil*

2008 Gainsboro Road

Rockville, MD 20851

*Former Director of Conservation, NJ Audubon Society and NJ Coastal Coordinator, American Littoral Society, 1988-2001