LETTERS

From the issue of Sept. 14, 2006.

Thanks for supporting bone marrow screening
To the editor:
   On Aug. 19th, over 100 individuals stepped forward to become registrants in the National Marrow Donor Program.
   Their willingness to volunteer was in partly due to the genesis of the Hillsborough Fire Co. #2 Marrow Registration Drive: Tatiana "Tata" Alissa Ingraham. Prior to Tatiana’s passing in May 2005 due to complications of her Leukemia, she had been matched to 252 potential donors.
   The fire company would like to thank the following individuals and businesses, for without their donations and support, the drive would not have been possible: The Ritortos, Carmine Lefanto, The Gronsbells, The Strupinskys, Linda Bergen, The Lewis’s, Stacy Lewis, Patricia Ingraham-Brown, Ron Ingraham, MEDICOR Cardiology, Sonzogni, Bottitto & Fingerhut LLC, Hillsborough Funeral Home Inc, Maxi South, Bagelicious, Chicken Holiday, Eckerd, Charlie Brown’s, Ortho-McNeil, Inc, ShopRite, Ringoes Motorcar & Truck Sales, Learning Express, ERA Real Estate, Petrock’s Bar and Grille, Big Wing Wah Restaurant and Joe Cioce, Esq.
   Many thanks to all be people who made anonymous donations and to those that we missed to include in the list.
   To the individuals who signed up to be potential donors, your actions and generosity to help save a life are truly appreciated.
Mohammed Khashab

Hillsborough Township

Volunteer Fire Co. no. 2

Family thankful for condolences
To the editor:
   The family of former Deputy Mayor John Gelardi extends a sincere thank you to all who have taken a moment to say a prayer, sent a note, made a donation to the American Heart Association, and came to visit John.
   It has given me and my family great comfort to know that many of you knew John well and that he enjoyed being among people and we all enjoyed being around him.
Kathy Gelardi

and the Gelardi Family

Hillsbroough

State doesn’t want to control deer
To the editor:
   Scientific data, and not a spinning of the facts by hunters, is what the public needs to be informed.
   It is not difficult to see how NJ Division of Fish and Wildlife works to keep the deer inventory high. The state needs to keep a high deer inventory for economic reasons. It is the deer-inventory restoration projects that ultimately harm New Jersey’s suburban communities.
   For many decades the game code was constructed for "maximum sustainable deer population." Buck season was the focus because deer are polygamist creatures — even a few remaining bucks could continue to impregnate the remaining does. Thus hunting bucks would have little impact on the deer population.
   How about the 1963 "Doe Day" that started the antlerless deer controversy in New Jersey?
   It revealed how farmers wanted deer management to genuinely lower deer numbers because of crop depredation.
   Hunters opposed it — they wanted deer managed for maximum replenishing for hunting.
   Farmers lease wildlife management areas with the caveat that they leave 15 percent of their crops un-harvested as deer/wildlife food. They are creating an artificial food supply to keep deer optimally healthy, well nourished and proliferating at maximum capacity. There is a special use permit/letter of agreement with the policies.
   Indeed, we actually seem to want to increase our deer population. A Hunterdon County freeholder and state assemblywoman was recently quoted in the Hunterdon County Democrat as saying, "the state Department of Environmental Protection has twice imported deer from other states to increase the white tailed deer herd here."
   It has been said that immunocontraception is not an effective tool for wildlife management, but recent studies with free-ranging white-tail deer, California ground squirrels, captive Norway rats, domestic and feral swine and wild horses have demonstrated the efficacy of the single-shot GnRH vaccine as a contraceptive agent.
   Infertility among treated female swine and white-tailed deer, for example, lasted up to 2 years without requiring a booster vaccination. Ongoing studies are examining the practicality of administering GonaCon™ to free-ranging white-tailed deer as well as the efficacy, toxicity, and safety of the vaccine.
   Pivotal field studies underway in Maryland and New Jersey are evaluating the efficacy of GonaCon™ as a contraceptive agent for free-ranging female white-tailed deer under field conditions.
   Twenty-eight does were captured, marked, vaccinated with GonaCon, and released; 15 additional does were captured, marked, and released without vaccination, as untreated control animals. NWRC scientists returned to Silver Spring during July 2005 to help Maryland WS personnel locate fawns and identify their mothers.
   The reproductive success of untreated does was 83 percent while that of treated does was only 12 percent, showing that the GonaCon vaccine is an effective wildlife infertility agent. The Silver Spring study will continue through the summer of 2006 and will provide deer reproductive data for two breeding seasons after the does were vaccinated with GonaCon.
   The cost of GonaCon is coupled with the time and money required to inject or dart the deer, which can vary. The vaccine itself only costs $2–$10 per dose.
   In the Aug. 18th edition of the Star Ledger, there is an article on this immunocontraception study finding the vaccine has 30 percent failure rate, but a 30 percent failure rate means a 70 percent success rate. Most FDA approved drugs on the market only have an efficacy rate of 70-80 percent, so a 70 percent success rate is right within an expected range.
   Indeed, cancer drugs can have an efficacy rate as low as 25 percent.
   Yes, there are residents that are greatly annoyed by deer. But those residents would be best served by directing their anger toward the Division of Fish & Wildlife.
   The Division of Fish & Wildlife as been totally ineffective at reducing the population of deer in this state, because frankly, they don’t want to.
Rose Reina-Rosenbaum

Hillsborough

Candidate’s position would block bypass
To the editor:
   Montgomery Township Mayor Louise Wilson’s letter about the Route 206 Bypass, printed in a recent issue of the Beacon, is a cynical and blatant attempt to use deception to persuade Hillsborough residents into voting for her in the upcoming county Freeholder election.
   As a Hillsborough committeeman from 2003-05, I know and had to deal with the actual truth — that Ms. Wilson is the single most uncompromising foe of the Route 206 Bypass, and has worked harder than anyone else in recent years to stop it from ever being built.
   We need the bypass to help relieve traffic on Route 206 which will have a positive impact throughout the southern portion of Somerset County.
   In her letter, Ms. Wilson says that an alternative to the Bypass is reasonable because the Bypass is a "$180 million, 4-mile highway that has already been delayed for so many years." How disingenuous!
   Why is the Bypass so delayed, and thus so costly? Mayor Wilson has implacably opposed it.
   Montgomery sued the state DOT to stop the project, and even after agreeing to a legal settlement in 1993 that explicitly stated that the Bypass should be built in its present alignment, has persistently violated the agreement and worked tirelessly against it.
   And what is Ms. Wilson’s supposedly "reasonable alternative" alignment? To curve it westward after it crosses south of Hillsborough Road, so that its south end intersects the current Route 206 at Mountain View Road. A redesign would take the road out of its federally approved route, for which a formal environmental assessment has been completed.
   Doing that would, under federal rules, require a new environmental assessment.
   Despite Ms. Wilson’s claim in her letter, that would put the Bypass project back at square one, and starting it from scratch would mean that the current federal funding, which was allocated to the state for the project as designed, would be lost, dooming it permanently.
   THAT is the goal that Ms. Wilson has with her "redesign" deception. As I heard one Montgomery official once say, "We stopped Route 95, and we’ll stop this, too."
   In September 2004, at state DOT headquarters, Kevin Davis and I from Hillsborough, and Ms. Wilson and other Montgomery officials, met with Commissioner Jack Lettiere about the Bypass. Mr. Lettiere made it clear that a redesign of the Bypass would destroy it, and that Montgomery’s insistence on it was a violation of the 1993 legal agreement.
   He affirmed that the state would honor that agreement, and demanded that Montgomery officials do the same.
   Instead, Ms. Wilson has ignored the commissioner, leading Montgomery in taking the following recent actions: 1) threatening a new lawsuit, 2) adopting a new Master Plan Amendment with a map that showed a redesigned Bypass in Hillsborough, an arrogant act aimed at tricking state and county officials (in "cross-accepting" the Amendment) to make the redesign an official part of their plans, and 3) asking the Federal Highway Administration to redo the environmental assessment.
   Ms. Wilson’s hostile actions contradict the conciliatory rhetoric of her letter.
   The bottom line is this — any Hillsborough resident who votes for Louise Wilson on Nov. 7 is voting to ignore our traffic problems on Route 206. We need the Bypass to improve the flow of traffic through our township and unlock planned areas for economic development which will help alleviate local property taxes.
Dr. Steven Sireci

Former mayor,

Hillsborough Township