Builders undermine environmental protections
If anyone doubts the inordinate influence the building and related industries have on our state legislators, consider their continuous and blatant efforts to weaken and even erase our environmental protection laws.

A while back, building lobbyists proposed a "fast track" law that would have required a deliberately understaffed Department of Environmental Protection to act on construction permits within a specific period of time. Otherwise, the permits would be automatically approved. Public outcries quickly sidetracked the builders' newest fast track

Then Joseph Doria, commissioner of the Department of Community Affairs, convened a task force loaded with building representatives and affordable housing advocates that recommended that DEP regulations affecting affordable housing be "more flexible" — which in builder-ese means "weaker" — and that the state Planning Commission be given the power to overrule both state and local zoning and environmental laws.

When a blind-sided DEP Commissioner Lisa Jackson and environmentalists protested, Doria mumbled the report from his developers' task force was only a draft "for discussion purposes."

Undaunted, the builders recently outlined their vision of the future with Gov. Jon Corzine. Then, a "permit extension" bill appeared magically in the Legislature that would eviscerate many of our environmental protection laws.

Playing on the fears aroused by the sub-prime loan crisis — which incidentally sprung fully armed from the building and associated lending industries — politicians foolishly touted the bill as an economic stimulus package that would extend all building and environmental permits and with a clause caustically described as the "Dracula clause," that would even resuscitate permits that expired as far back as 2006. The environmental laws that these permits, rising from the dead, would circumvent are too numerous to mention here.

The bill laments the "difficulty and expense" the state's "banking, real estate and construction sectors" face because of the economic turndown while ignoring our state's environmental losses. Have we not overdeveloped this state like none other in the entire country?

Instead, the bill ridiculously claims "The building industry, and many landowners and developers are seeing their life's work destroyed by the lack of credit and dearth of buyers and tenants" — what drama. The bill supposedly would alleviate the state's "economic emergency," which it claims began on Jan.1, 2006, and will end on Dec. 31, 2012. Mr. Bernanke, your Fed should take note of these dates.

This builders' magna carta would allow builders to get around many DEP laws by extending dead or dormant permits well into the next decade. All the measures enacted in the last two years to stop flooding, protect rivers and open spaces would not count. Good town planning practices would be for naught. Even King John wouldn't have signed this in 1215.

Our legislators' haste to approve this bill also may place them in conflict with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has already warned the state about violating any federal laws or agreements, which the state has agreed to enforce.

So why did more than 40 legislators jump to gut our environmental protections in a state where 75 percent of our waterways are too polluted for our children to swim or fish in?

Perhaps an analogy would help: feudal kings controlled their vassals by buying their loyalty with gifts — land and serfs. Today the kings rule through campaign contributions. But we still have the vote to remove those foolish vassals of the king. Thank you, Amy Handlin, for being the Maid Marian of Monmouth County and even the state.
Judith Stanley Coleman
President
Monmouth Conservation
Foundation
Middletown