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Real Reporting Would Open Pandora’s Box

Highlands Council’s Unprecedented Vote Raises A Trifecta Of Political Taboos

State Land Use Planning & Regulation; Effective Activism; Political Corruption

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

I’m asking myself those kinds of questions in the wake of non-existent or deeply flawed news coverage of last week’s unprecedented vote by the NJ Highlands Council to kill a proposed warehouse on rural farmland.

The Vote was a major win for local activists and it was the first test of the Highlands Council’s new warehouse policy.

The proposed warehouse – on farmland – also involved a long abused provision of NJ’s municipal land use law regarding designation of “areas in need of redevelopment”. That designation has been used across the State to promote poorly planned and inappropriate development that bypassed municipal Master Plans and zoning ordinances:

The redevelopment plan shall supersede applicable provisions of the development regulations of the municipality or constitute an overlay zoning district within the redevelopment area.

But despite this long-standing and widespread abuse of the 1992 redevelopment law, no environmental group has issued a Report or mounted a campaign for legislative reform.

A similar “redevelopment” designation authority was built into the NJ Highlands Act, but only to promote “appropriate” redevelopment that meets the goals and objectives of the Act, importantly, as determined by the Highlands Council (not so called “home rule” local government).

The NJ Highlands are a special environmentally sensitive region protected by State law and a regional management plan – and the Highlands Act just celebrated its 20th anniversary.

Hundreds of millions of square feet of warehouse developments have exploded across the State in recent years. The huge public resistance to new warehouse development has gotten significant NJ media attention over those same last few years.

Yet virtually all of that news coverage has focused almost exclusively on local issues and so called “municipal home rule”, while DEP and environmental groups have been invisible.

Few are aware that the NJ DEP has rubber stamped water quality management plan approvals and land use permits for millions of square feet of new warehouse development. The DEP’s role in promoting the explosion of warehouse growth has been completely ignored by media and environmental groups.

After ignoring the issue for years, recently NJ environmental groups have engaged, but have framed the warehouse issue along “environmental justice” lines: (Clean Water Action)

On June 18, 2024, I had the opportunity to co-host a virtual press conference with Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) where Clean Water Action co-released a NJ Warehouses Proximity Report.  We showcased a series of regional maps illustrating high concentrations of warehouses throughout New Jersey and the corresponding impact these facilities pose.

The CWA and EDF Report and warehouse campaign are misfocused and misguided, in both their analysis and recommended reforms.

So, given all these obviously high priority public policy and newsworthy issues, why has this particular warehouse project and the Highlands Council’s unprecedented vote to kill it gotten short shrift by media and environmental groups?

My theory involves a complex inter-related set of deeply problematic dynamics.

First, over the last decade, the issues of sprawl and State land use planning and regulation have been abandoned by the Foundations, environmental groups, and media. Those groups have narrowed and shifted their work almost exclusively to climate and/or environmental justice (as if paving over forests and farms for millions of square feet of fossil powered buildings and trucks were not a climate issue!).

Second, the role of State government in land use planning and regulation has been intentionally suppressed. Planning and regulatory issues are complex and it takes real work by environmental groups to do effective advocacy and for the media to write those stories. Advocacy of regulatory power, particularly with respect to land use, puts billions of dollars of corporate profit at risk and challenges corporate power. Real advocacy and accountability journalism on Gov. Murphy and his DEP’s horrible regulatory and land use record would require the environmental groups and media to become critical and adversarial, which would contradict their current roles as cheerleaders and stenographers.

Third, the Highlands vote reflected a win for local environmental activists in rural Warren County. The media is loath to report victories by activists, as it weakens corporate power and offends their corporate owners and funders. The environmental groups have no interest in rural local groups working on land use, other than to use them as props for Foundation grants and press releases.

Fourth, the Highlands Council’s staff Report and the Council’s actions and deliberations on the proposed warehouse plan were so twisted and wrongheaded that it strongly suggested corruption.

Public testimony to the Council highlighted the fact, as recently reported by Politico,that Warren County Republican State Senator Doug Steinhardt is under FBI investigation for profiting for flipping land for warehouse development in South Jersey.

Federal authorities are investigating a real estate deal involving two New Jersey state senators who bought public land and then flipped it for seven times the original price.

Investigators recently subpoenaed records of the real estate transaction in Vineland, in South Jersey. A federal grand jury subpoena sent to the Vineland Industrial Commission and obtained by POLITICO seeks documents and communications related to the sale of the lot at 1615 W. Garden Road, which is now an almost-completed cold storage warehouse, according to a Vineland official.

Local residents allege that Steinhardt and his law firm have involvement with the proposed warehouse development before the Council.

So, taken as a whole, real reporting on the Council’s vote would open up a Pandora’s Box of political taboo topics: from political corruption, to ineffective Foundation grants to incompetent and misdirected environmental groups, to media stenography, to the power of informed activism, to a lax Murphy DEP, and to a failed State Land Use plan.

And nobody wants to go near any of that. They’re worse than cowards: they’re corrupt careerists.