Parks and Pork

Today, the Governor signed several bills providing hundreds of millions for "open space" preservation projects. But two of them merit special consideration: first, S-2640, provided – at the time the Legislature approved it – for $65.822 million in spending in cities. The other, S-2632, provided $15 million for land preservation in the Highlands region. What’s wrong with this picture?

S-2640 contains a list of projects to be undertaken in "‘urban aid’ densely or highly populated" municipalities. It includes such highlights as $800,000 for the Hackensack High School Athletic Fields, $500,000 for playground improvements in Irvington, $800,000 for a school stadium complex at Woodbury High School, $250,000 for rehabilitation of an observatory tower in Paterson, etc. I highlight these not because they are egregious, but just because they are funded. Many other parks, walkways, and the like, received similar grants.

A quick perusal of the list reveals that these projects, while perhaps worthy local expenditures, serve no state purpose. And the appropriation for "urban" areas was as large as the open space preservation budget for the rest of the state, combined.

‘Course, every legislator – but one – voted for this proposal; one must, after all, choose one’s battles.

But it seems to that one legislator that the state’s priorities are more than a tad askew.

A paltry $15 million for farmland preservation in the highlands? In Montville alone, one substantial tract was worth – before the Highlands law devalued it by 98% or so – about $100 million. While we’re spending $66 million playing around with Little League ballfields in Maywood and a skateboard park in Kearny, the land which assertedly supplies half the state with its drinking water rates peanuts.

Governing requires making choices. This urban "open space" initiative constitutes nothing more than pork, the same sort of pork which beset the homeland security and Christmas Tree programs. It takes no rocket scientist to glean that the vast majority of these funds are being spent in Democratic districts. Given the choice between spending scarce resources to protect threatened open spaces, upon which fully half of the state’s population allegedly depends for its drinking water, and making improvements to the 47th Street Pool in Union City, for which do you think the Democratic leadership opted?