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Liberty State Park Highly Vulnerable to Private Development

NJ Gov. Murphy signed an emergency COVID budget that includes a provision that could lead to private development and commercialization of State Parks, including the controversial proposed development of Liberty State Park.

It remains unclear exactly how the privatization language was stealthed into the budget by lobbyists, but it was approved by the Governor’s Office, over the objection of several legislators and park advocates.

Here is the language, as in the adopted emergency budget law the Gov. just signed (@ page 95)

Once again, Murphy Spin In Conflict With Science

EJ Communities Had No Knowledge Of Or Role In DEP Revision Process

[Update below]

While Gov. Murphy and his environmental cheerleaders are congratulating themselves over their proposed environmental justice legislation (which relies exclusively on individual DEP permit reviews), the Murphy DEP just revised and updated air pollution cancer and health risk screening levels that form the basis for air pollution permit reviews and pollution control requirements, and thus will have a huge impact on environmental justice communities.

The revisions were made to the DEP’s technical protocols for conducting risk assessments as part of the air pollution permit review process. They are based largely on federal EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), not NJ specific conditions or DEP scientists’ recommendations.

As far as I can tell, while there was considerable involvement by industry experts in DEP’s process for making these revisions, there was little or no involvement by the public, health experts, and the environmental justice and environmental communities. In addition to the industrial stakeholder process, just look at who provided comments to DEP on the risk screening document and who DEP is giving an inside track and heads up and responding to (source, see: DEP reply to industry comments):

Here is the DEP document, with DEP’s explanation:

REVISIONS TO THE NJDEP/DAQ INHALATION TOXICITY VALUES AND THE RISK SCREENING WORKSHEET (June 2020)

The NJDEP Division of Air Quality list of inhalation toxicity values and the risk screening worksheet have been updated.

Specific changes to the unit risk factors (URFs), long-term reference concentrations (RfCs), and short- term RfCs are noted below. The revisions are incorporated into the list of “Toxicity Values for Inhalation Exposure,” dated June 2020.

Let me first put that DEP document in context.

Air pollution is perhaps the single largest source of adverse public health impacts and risks to overburdened poor and/or minority communities, particularly in urban locations. Residents are chronically exposed to hundreds of individual chemical air pollutants from multiple concentrated sources of pollution (industry, cars, trucks, garbage incinerators, sewage treatment plants, aircraft, ships, etc).

People are exposed to not only air pollution, but multiple other sources and routes of exposure, including water pollution, workplace exposures, food contaminants, and risks from solid and hazardous waste facilities and toxic sites.

The health risks from these exposures are exacerbated by other socio-economic and land use factors, such as poverty, lack of healthcare, lack of access to fresh foods & vegetables (“food deserts”), lack of access to open spaces, exercise and recreational opportunities, and other health stressors, from noise and “heat islands” to structural and individual racism.

These health impacts, risks from pollution and socio-economic factors are disproportionately concentrated in poor and minority communities.

This phenomenon is what has given rise to the environmental justice movement.

With that in mind, and at a time when the Governor himself is touting his concerns about environmental justice, it is remarkable that the DEP’s revisions ignore the key scientific aspects of cancer risks to urban environmental justice communities, which are:

1) people’s exposure to multiple individual cancer causing air pollutants from current background pollution levels;

2) the cumulative impacts of multiple exposure pathways to multiple individual pollutants, and

3) the existing actual health conditions and susceptibility and vulnerability of the exposed population.

In addition to these significant gaps and flaws, the DEP science, risk screening revisions, and overall policy do not address what public health advocates call the “precautionary principle“, which is:

The precautionary principle, proposed as a new guideline in environmental decision making, has four central components: taking preventive action in the face of uncertainty; shifting the burden of proof to the proponents of an activity; exploring a wide range of alternatives to possibly harmful actions; and increasing public participation in decision making.

As we can see, in addition to ignoring environmental justice, the DEP fails all four prongs of the precautionary principle.

Industrial stakeholders themselves exposed the fraud of the DEP screening process. In their own words, DEP rarely imposes additional pollution controls to protect public health: (see comments #2 and #5, by NJBIA & an industry consultant)

We need real reforms – not token symbolic gestures by the Governor and cheerleading by his sycophants in the “environmental community”.

[Update – Intro: We hope we are not guilty of not providing adequate context:

Disparity figures without explanatory context can perpetuate harmful myths and misunderstandings that actually undermine the goal of eliminating health inequities. Such clarifying perspective is required not just for Covid-19 but also for future epidemics. […]

First, data in a vacuum can give rise to biologic explanations for racial health disparities. Such explanations posit that congenital qualities unique to specific racial minorities predispose them to higher rates of a particular disease. […]

Second, lone disparity figures can give rise to explanations grounded in racial stereotypes about behavioral patterns. […]

Third, geographic disaggregation of Covid-19 data is welcome but requires caution ….

In sum, to mitigate myths of racial biology, behavioral explanations predicated on racial stereotypes, and territorial stigmatization, Covid-19 disparities should be situated in the context of material resource deprivation caused by low SES, chronic stress brought on by racial discrimination, or place-based risk. (read the entire article) ~~~ end update]

NJBIA Lobbyist Ray Cantor Needs To Apologize

[Update: 7/2/20: today’s NY Times story makes exactly the point I was driving at:

““It’s especially abhorrent for the president to threaten further entrenchment of segregated communities now, during a time of reckoning on racial injustices in our country,” Ms. Yentel said. A direct line connects America’s history of racist housing policies to today’s overpolicing of Black and brown communities.” ~~~end update]

I tacked this on as an “End Note” to my earlier post about the proposed environmental justice legislation, but, upon reflection feel it is so outrageous that it needs its own post.

Ray Cantor, currently Vice-President and a lobbyist for the NJ Business and Industry Association (NJBIA), was quoted today in a NJ Spotlight story opposing the proposed environmental justice bill.

Obviously, there’s nothing unusual about that – NJBIA almost always opposes environmental laws that would restrict business profits.

But in doing so, Ray Cantor, a former Christie DEP political appointee, claimed that the bill would “red-line” business:

As drafted, the bill would essentially redline any new manufacturing facility or expansion in large parts of New Jersey, Cantor said. “There’s a better way to address this problem,’’ he added.

That claim is a gross abuse of history – i.e. “red-lining” was a systematic and blatantly racist policy deployed by financial institutions and governments to effectively racially segregate US cities and deprive black people of home ownership and business investment by denying mortgage financing and services to entire “red-lined” communities. (The flip side of “red-lining” was massive government investment in infrastructure and services that subsidized and promoted suburban sprawl and the white people who moved there (AKA “white flight”) and were able to own their homes as a result of subsidized mortgages).

We are still suffering the racist legacy of red-lining, which continues to shape the land use patterns and economic development of entire metropolitan regions, effecting everything from segregated schools to the huge wealth and income disparities between black and white people.

To compare a bill designed to promote environmental justice by limiting pollution to already overburdened poor and/or minority communities to the historical practice of racist red-lining is deeply cynical and beyond the pale.

In the current context, it is simply unacceptable. Words matter.

That’s like a police union representative claiming that cops are being “lynched” by “mobs”.

Folks need to contact NJBIA and demand that Cantor apologize for what, at best, is a historical lie and gross insensitivity.

Bill Would NOT Give EJ Communities ANY Power

Local approval provision of original bill was deleted

I previously wrote about the sham going on with the so called “environmental justice” bill by exposing the fact that the bill would not do anything to reduce the current pollution that is now adversely effecting the health of people who live in environmental justice communities. The “environmental justice” and “cumulative impact” reviews would apply only to future “new or expanded” pollution sources, not the sources of current pollution that is causing harm to the mostly poor and black & brown people who live in overburdened communities.

[Update: the bill was amended to provide authority to DEP to impose conditions on permit renewals of some existing facilities that cause current pollution burdens. However, there are no “nexus” requirements to assure that the conditions DEP might impose actually reduce the pollution, eliminate the disproportionate EJ burden, or  protect public health. And this bill still exempts small sources of pollution and has numerous loopholes and waivers that render it useless and ineffective. ~~~ end update]

In that post, I also noted that the provision that would give EJ communities real power – effectively a veto over any DEP permit approval – was deleted from the original introduced version of the bill (see Section 3.c.) by a Senate Committee Substitute bill (S232 [SCS]). As a result, EJ communities have no real power, and can only make comments and requests to DEP.

The original bill was gutted completely.

I therefore questioned why the so called “EJ activists” supported the bill and praised the Governor given these facts.

Since then, NJ Spotlight has gone all in and sponsored a “virtual roundtable” on the bill for today (6/30/20) at 4 pm on zoom. The panelists include the so called EJ activists that supported the bill, plus a representative of corporate giant PSE&G.

Not to be outdone by Gov. Murphy, NJ Senator Cory Booker jumped into the debate and will “offer opening remarks”. Booker, as a former Mayor of Newark, has political liabilities on EJ issues and a relationship with at least one panelist.

Curiously, NJ Spotlight has expanded the scope of their “roundtable” to include a second bill:

(S-2484) creates within the BPU the Office of Clean Energy Equity and seeks to ensure those living in low- and moderate-income communities share in the benefit of ratepayers’ investment in the state’s clean energy future.

This expansion in scope completely shifts the focus away from the real EJ pollution bill, no doubt to avoid a discussion of the fact that the bill is a sham.

Worse, today Spotlight wrote a set up story on the real EJ bill, and they doubled down on the false and misleading reporting on it.

Specifically, Spotlight’s story opens with this factually false statement:

For the first time, New Jersey communities could be given a powerful new tool to block projects that would add to their pollution burden under a bill approved by the Senate Monday.

That claim is not only false, it is the opposite of what the bill actually does. This is a lie and journalistic malpractice.

The bill does not give “New Jersey communities … a powerful new tool to block projects”.

As I wrote, the Senate substitute bill  stripped the provision that would have given EJ communities real power to block projects. (see Section 3.c. of the original version linked above – readers can also confirm this fact by reviewing last session’s version of the bill, S1700, section 3.c., which included the local veto. You can further confirm that by reading the bracketed (deleted) local veto provision in Section 3.c. the Senate revised bill, see S1700[1R]. The bill was gutted last session, as I wrote at the time.)

This is not a question of interpretation – it is a fact.

The NJ Spotlight story also misleads readers about the effects of the bill, given that it would only apply to the pollution from “new or expanded” projects, not current pollution.

That flaw is fatal and should be directly discussed.

Instead, Spotlight uses the word “further pollution” in the headline of the story. That insulates them from criticism on the “existing” versus future pollution flaw I’ve highlighted.

Worse, they use a so called EJ activist to reveal that fatal flaw:

“In many ways, this has been the ‘holy grail’ of the environmental-justice movement,’’ said Nicky Sheats, of the New Jersey Environmental Alliance. “We get so frustrated when they put one more polluting facility in an environmental-justice community when they already have so many. At some point, they have to say no.’’

Do you see how they did that?

Tom Johnson of NJ Spotlight tucked an allusion to a fatal flaw at the tail end of an over the top praiseworthy quote of a black EJ activist (“holy grail”).

That is some deeply cynical shit.

So is the false reporting about giving EJ communities a “powerful new tool” when their power was actually stripped from the bill. DEP maintains exclusive authority, the local role is purely advisory – lipstick on a pig.

I think it is journalistic malpractice that borders on evil, because Tom Johnson knew exactly what he was doing.

I feel really bad for Nicky Sheats, who got used this way.

[End Note: Shame on Ray Cantor who, in an Orwellian move, used the term “red-lining” to criticize environmental justice legislation. He surely must know that historically, the black community was “red-lined” out of cities and into ghetto’s across the country (and on NJ Spotlight for printing that remark in a stenographic mode, with no criticism or context).

Ray Cantor, a vice president of the New Jersey Business & Industry Association, said his organization is sympathetic and understanding of the issues in communities that suffer environmental impact from new projects.

As drafted, the bill would essentially redline any new manufacturing facility or expansion in large parts of New Jersey, Cantor said. “There’s a better way to address this problem,’’ he added.

I head for the sticks with my bus and friends
I follow the road though I don’t know where it ends
Get out of town, get out of town
Think I’ll get out of town. ~~~ On The Beach (Neil Young, 1974)

Copper Harbor Michigan is a gorgeous place and we’ve been here for just over a week. A peninsula on a peninsula into Lake Superior.

It’s one of the most extreme points in the lower 48 – like these northwest coast and northeast coast points. We love that! And we’re now 63 on the shores of Superior!

We have been at a pretty good site just 5 miles or so outside of town in the woods, where we could bike in to a relatively isolated small town for food and supplies. At first, we struggled with the skeeters, but I thought it might be a place we could stay for awhile, if not the whole summer.

But we’ll leave tomorrow, as today we experienced a sudden tourist boom – heavy traffic, with lots of those off road asshole vehicles and lots of luxury SUV’s with mountain bikes on the back.

It wasn’t like this last weekend. Maybe it’s a buildup to the July 4th weekend or maybe it’s a result of the COVID re-opening or maybe it’s just normal summer tourism.

But it sucks and fuck that shit, it’s one of the reasons we left the west and headed east.

Maybe we can’t get away from it, but we’ll keep trying.

Update with photos I just downloaded: