GREAT SWAMP WATERSHED ASSOCIATION Winter 2001 |
|
|
From the Desk of Julia Somers, Executive Director High Tolerance for Tedium Brings Results in Seven-Year Land Battle The news on November 13 couldn't have been more satisfying: 58 acres of steeply sloping woods, along Mt. Kemble Avenue in Morris Township, were to be saved forever from the developer's bulldozer. (See news article, above for details.) Why the great satisfaction? Simply because the tract in question had long been considered prime both for development and for protection. Suddenly, after seven long years of fighting with preservationists and of being unable to respond satisfactorily to Morris Township Planning Board concerns, the developer had called a truce: The land would be preserved, and the developer would pocket $1.7 million, a "bargain sale" that would also generate significant tax benefits. Though preservation of this tract was truly a team effort, it would be too modest not to point out GSWA's leadership efforts in the matter. To some, a list of our efforts will seem tedious and repetitious. But in cases like this, a high tolerance for tedium can be a small price to pay for such a gratifying end result. Our work began in 1993. Since then, GSWA has appeared before the Morris Township Planning Board on more than 30 separate occasions, often bringing in expert legal and engineering witnesses and energizing local residents to attend. We worked behind the scenes with three different municipal engineers, four mayors and three township administrations. We persuaded the NJDEP, via more meetings and professional testimony, that the township should not be permitted to extend its municipal sewer system into the tract. We persuaded Harding Township, which is directly downstream from the property, to provide professional testimony to protect its environmental interests. We helped persuade the 10 Towns Committee to testify about the importance of not building on steep slopes and of protecting forest cover. We wrote letters to the editor and held informal press conferences. We emphasized the importance of the property in our 1997 publication Saving Space: The Great Swamp Watershed Greenway and Open Space Plan. We are helping to put together the funding to purchase the property. And more. All of which is not to say that we could have done it by ourselves. The organizations mentioned in the page 1 news article played absolutely key roles. The Morris Township Planning Board must be credited for doing something that municipal bodies do not always do: listening long and carefully to both sides of the issue. The Township Committee had the foresight and patience to try repeatedly to persuade the property owner to sell the property for open space. NJDEP also weighed in at critical junctures. The local newspapers provided continuing coverage. And finally, developer Harvey Caplan deserves our gratitude for agreeing to November's solution. * * * * * There's another point that this success story underscores. Last fall, we sent out an electronic survey to the roughly 300 GSWA members for whom we had e-mail addresses. We asked them to tell us, by selecting from a menu of 13 options, the top three reasons why they support us. To our great surprise, we quickly received almost 100 responses - an amazing (to us anyway) 33% response rate. By an overwhelming margin, the three winners were:
There's a great deal of overlap, of course, among these and the other survey selections offered. That was intentional, since many of our projects are broad enough to support a variety of goals. But what we wanted to learn through the survey was which ways of describing our work - in other words, what language - seemed most important to members. And now it turns out that our work leading to November's acquisition is precisely the sort of thing our members (at least those members who are on our e-mail address list) most want us to be engaged in. And that is very gratifying to know.
|
||
Home | Newsletters | Previous | Next |
