Private interests put
before public trust
The National Park Service has come up with a novel way to give developer Sandy Hook Partners LLC another six months to secure financing for its redevelopment plan for 36 historic buildings at Fort Hancock on Sandy Hook.
Marie Rust, NPS Northeast regional director, went ahead and signed a lease with Sandy Hook Partners last Friday, and while she was at it, changed the rules yet again for Rumson resident James Wassel, head of Sandy Hook Partners.
Wassel has already received two, six-month extensions of the original letter of intent he signed with the park service in November 2001.
Now that the lease is signed, he has been given another six months to line up financing for phase 1 of the $75 million rehab project.
The agency had previously decided that Wassel could carry out the project in three phases and didn’t have to have financing for the entire project — only for phase 1 — to qualify for a 60-year historic lease (and $10 million in tax credits) for all the buildings.
In fact, Wassel was able to get a lease after showing he had raised only $13 million, less than one-third of the $75 million total.
That’s a better deal than Monmouth County Friends of Clearwater got when its proposal to rehabilitate its longtime Sandy Hook headquarters was turned down by the park service because it did not have adequate funding for the entire project.
Wassel now has another six months, and possibly longer, to line up investors for a project that is very different from the proposal he submitted — late — in 1999 and for which he has been unable to secure significant financing or tenants.
If the park service applied the same ingenuity it demonstrated in getting Sandy Hook Partners to a lease signing, to finding a way to build on the campus of nonprofits already at Sandy Hook, it might have found a way to have the site designated a Learning Center like the four that already exist within the park system, including the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Center at the other end of Gateway National Recreation Area.
There, an expanded version of the research, environmental and educational partnerships already in place at Sandy Hook have been encouraged and funded by Congress.
The Department of the Interior has a plan in place, put on hold by budget constraints, to fund 32 such centers throughout the country to foster research and development, and all are devoid of private, for-profit interests. Look them up on the DOI Web site under Natural Resource Challenge.
When asked why the concept couldn’t be extended to the nascent core of partnerships already in place at The Hook, park service officials lamely said they didn’t want to dilute the pool of funds available.
Instead, the agency wrong-headedly put its weight behind a project that had only a vague outline, submitted by an individual who had no redevelopment experience outside of the retail realm and who had no credentials as a master planner.
And it refused to let the public in on exactly what was planned for the lands that are the birthright of each and every one of us. Only after a public outcry and intervention by U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-6), did the NPS make the proposal available, and it was so heavily redacted, much of the salient information, particularly financial data, was not accessible.
Once on this course, the agency continued to treat the 2,000-acre national park like its private preserve to make available for plunder instead of the natural and cultural heritage of future generations.
While 200 or so people have come out in support of the redevelopment, close to 3,000 citizens have signed Save Sandy Hook’s petition (available at www.savesandyhook.org) opposing the give-away of Sandy Hook to private, for-profit interests.
If you weren’t one of them, it’s not too late to be counted.