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Guest Column
Ed Pfeiffer
Sierra club official: Agreement undermines authority

Your Turn Guest Column Ed Pfeiffer Sierra club official: Agreement undermines authority

Guest Column
Ed Pfeiffer
Sierra club official: Agreement undermines authority


In their rush to get those massive warehouses up and running, and to sprawl an industrial park deep into the "red" area of the BIG map before it can be stopped — an area of 434 acres of farmland, potential habitat for endangered species, and an area of Revolutionary War skirmishes and encampments — Matrix and Washington Township have apparently trumped New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s environmental regulations and priorities. It’s the DEP’s Land Use program again.

Recently we at the Central Jersey Group of the Sierra Club have been very concerned about a proposed commercial development by the Matrix Corp. to build more than 5.8 million square feet of warehouse space (eight total warehouses) on rural land in "ripe for overdevelopment" Washington Township. (Hey, they have a lot of "empty" land out there if you look at it from the developer’s point of view.)

Unfortunately, as we noted before, this land is not "empty" — there is an abundance of threatened wildlife habitat there (note our reference in a previous letter to the editor of the sighting of a Savannah sparrow and reports of the bog turtle in the neighboring vicinity, not to mention a beaver dam next door.)

And then there are the neighbors in Upper Freehold Township who care about regional planning and important quality-of-life issues such as heavy truck traffic on country roads from this massive development — apparently, something not very important to your average developer like Matrix or Washington Township officials … and possibly … the higher-ups at DEP. Anyway, earlier this month, permits were issued as quickly as possible after an 11th-hour meeting with Land Use supervisors permitting Matrix to disregard a couple of wetlands that had conveniently disappeared from their wetlands delineation map as part of their application’s development plan — and that were, coincidentally, and very inconveniently, situated on the site for one of their proposed warehouses.

This last-minute meeting on May 6 was probably needed because real Land Use officers — the ones who actually go out in the field — did their job correctly and … drats!… in an investigation of the site where the wetlands had been farmed over, confirmed that these wetlands did indeed exist — just as shown, by the way, on a previous wetlands delineation map mysteriously overlooked before. Interestingly enough, the DEP probably should have considered this act of making the wetlands disappear a wetlands violation. However, this apparently was never considered at the meeting between Matrix and DEP supervisors just before the new Letter of Interpretation (LOI) was issued permitting them to do away with those pesky wetlands.

We know this because we reviewed the files and noted the previous delineation map, the developer’s proposed plans omitting these wetlands, the wetlands investigation and deficiency cited by Land Use officers, the meeting between DEP officials and Matrix, and the issuance of the LOI overruling that deficiency with no record of supporting reasons.

Sad to say, we’ve seen this before during Commissioner Robert Shinn’s administration of NJDEP. Then, they held a special meeting, a closed session between JDN Development Corp. and the DEP, from which stakeholders, citizens groups, and the Sierra Club were excluded, permitting the Hamilton Marketplace to build on wetlands, and they called it "substantial reliance." Now, on Commissioner Campbell’s watch, same meeting, same result, but they didn’t even bother to document it. New commissioner, same old DEP. Now, that’s really shameful when you consider that the McGreevey administration is supposed to be really committed to fighting sprawl and supporting Smart Growth.

And what is particularly egregious about all of this is that it undermines the authority of the Land Use program to protect the environment based on environmental regulations. It poses the question: Could any Smart Growth plan, any open space program, any BIG map, or "toolbox of regulations," or any authority be ultimately successful if one of the state government’s own agencies is unwilling to follow its own regulations or enforce the law on wetlands violations?

Ed Pfeiffer is the co-chair of the Central Jersey Group of the Sierra Club