Editorials

The following is a letter from a member of the NJPineBarrens.com forums to the Pinelands Commission regarding the use of what is essentially recycled trash and mulch to grade the sides of roads by the Ocean County Road Department in the Pinelands.

To Whom It May Concern:

I have brought this problem up three times before. Starting around six years ago I sent letters and emails to everyone I can think of to stop it. I received many promises; from Freeholders, Assemblymen, and even from the parties responsible for doing this. What I am talking about is Ocean County Road Department's habit of leveling the sides of County Pineland roads using ground up mulch and other material from other rural areas of Ocean County. The main problem is that this material is loaded with garbage.

Six weeks ago they did it again, in the Pinelands Preservation District along Lacey Road by Bamber Lake. After the rains, the junk that is mixed up with this material revealed itself. I picked up the below harvest basket of items out of this fill in just 30 minutes.

Your eyes do not deceive you. In just this one random sample, besides the wire and metal on the left, there is an inner tube, plastic action figure toys, plastic bottles, caps, and pipe fittings, a hunk of rebar, bits of wire, junk from home gardens, tennis and wiffle balls, a hair brush, plastic eating utensils, decorative car trim, house insulation, and even a beaded slipper.

Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian statesman, once said that politics is the art of the possible. In a letter to President John F. Kennedy, written while he was serving as U.S. Ambassador to India in 1969, economist John Kenneth Galbraith remarked that "politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." If those are the choices, then former Wall Street titan and now New Jersey Governor John Corzine, who has a $32 billion budget shortfall staring him in the face, has been leaning heavily toward the calamitous side of the equation. First there was his plan for raising tolls on the state's most important highways, in some cases by as much as fifty percent over ten years. That New Year's present to the population arrived like a skunk at an outdoor wedding reception, according to pollsters such as Clay Richards of Quinnipiac, who likened voter opposition to a "brick wall."

Now he's done the Vulcan Mind Meld with state DEP head Lisa P. Jackson and come up with another sure-fire public relations win. "Budget Cuts Would Close 9 State Parks" was the headline in the Courier Post on April 1, the date being perhaps part of a subtle communications strategy. The Associated Press reported the same day on "Painful Cuts" that would target Monmouth Battlefield, and other parks. Details of the plan were sketchy, with each interpreter free to arrive at a different conclusion: the parks would all close; some would close and others would not; even the ones that would close would remain open to visitors; etc. On April 3 conservative Paul Mulshine of the Star Ledger weighed in with a blast at Democrat Corzine for grandstanding on parks to the tune of $4 million in savings while his party-mates in the Legislature refuse to touch treasured programs (like the $156 million "distressed cities" fund).