Christie DEP Blasted For Open Space Land Diversion “Perversion”

Subsequent to the acquisition of the Property, the City approached the NJDEP to request the conveyance of the Property for commercial development purposes. The City and the MURC assert that the conveyance of the Property for these purposes is critical to ongoing efforts to relieve the City’s economic distress. 

What that means is that politics and politicians intervened at a high level – likely with the Governor’s Office or DEP Commissioner Martin – to reverse a DEP decision that was based on facts, science and sound landscape planning.

A Cumberland County planner testified to support the argument for developing the property. He said it was ideally suited for industrial development due to multiple and unique criteria: road frontage, rail access, water, sewer, industrial zoning and State Plan PA3 designation.

I testified and tried to explain how such obvious political intervention undermined the integrity of the DEP and why the local planning was so flawed.

I then spoke about DEP’s efforts I was involved with, during the McGreevey Administration, to revisit and fix many of those kind of historical planning mistakes that sent roads, water and sewer lines into environmentally sensitive lands and zoned those lands inappropriately for dense development and designated them sewer service areas.

That DEP effort, which was based on GIS mapping of various data layers that indicate environmental sensitivity, was called the Big Map. It was defeated by the development lobby and abandoned. But I assured the current DEP crew that this parcel of land likely would have multiple attributes of the criteria Big Map used to characterize environmental sensitivity.

Calling the DEP’s proposed land diversion a “perversion” and a “sellout”, Jeff Tittel of Sierra Club absolutely destroyed the City’s planning arguments by stating that the City of Millville has 56 million square feet of zoned industrial and commercial property – that is about 25 times the amount of development at the Merrill Lynch site in Hopewell.

Hundreds of local residents signed petitions and virtually every state and local conservation group testified to oppose the DEP plan, including NJ Audubon, American Littoral Society, ANJEC, NJ Conservation Foundation, Sierra CLub, NJ Environmental Lobby, and Citizens United to Protect the Maurice River.

[* Notably absent was Trust Fo Public Land, which is curious as they seem to have been very involved in assembling adjacent large parcels. Don’t know if the testified at prior hearing in Millville.  Playing the inside game, making pretty GIS maps, and writing checks to buy land is a very different model of advocacy compared to testifying at public hearings and criticizing people in high places for very bad decisions. WHo knows, that could jeopardize future State/DEP funding! TP can’t have that!]

I spoke and said that while I knew virtually nothing about the site, my main objection was to DEP’s basis for the decision and stated rationale to “relieve the City’s economic distress.”

It is not the DEP’s job and they are not authorized by the Legislature to sell preserved lands in order to promote economic development and “relieve economic distress”.

[* the stupid irony is that even if DEP sold the land to the City, that would not alleviate economic distress because there is no developer – the prior “major international corporation” that the City was negotiating with that was supposed to provide 350 – 1,000 jobs is gone. Left. There is no development proposal – this is all speculative.]

DEP has completely lost sight of its mission and is out of control – the environmental version of our rogue CIA.

If DEP can get away with that here, no land in NJ is safe or can be considered “permanently preserved”.

[PS – A woman from Friends of Princeton Open Space, sitting in the front row next to Emile Devito, outrageously interrupted my testimony.

In 30 years of DEP public hearings, I have never experienced that before, and I’ve been shouted down by “union thugs” and industry hacks who have threatened my life.

I have no idea what this woman was thinking.  It was simply amazing. She was objecting to my testimony about Open Space fund diversions.  Again, another example of the extreme arrogance and insular quality of the KIG coalition members. ~~~ end PS