RINGWOOD, N.J. (AP) - The sweat dripped onto the collar of Frank Dyer’s half-open jeans shirt in the fields around Skylands Manor in Ringwood State Park as he and three other volunteers cleared brush and spread mulch in a sprawling lilac garden.
It was punishing work on a July day when temperatures touched 90 before noon, and many workers were retired seniors.
But as money dedicated to maintaining and improving state parks dwindles amid mammoth budget gaps, the work by Dyer - a rangy, 75-year-old retired chemist - and his compatriots has become more necessity than luxury.
After all, if volunteers like them didn’t do this labor, who would?
But there are some projects they just can’t do, like replacing the historic Carriage House Visitor Center’s cedar-shingled roof, which rots under a quilt of damp moss, or paving the patched and potholed main road.
For that, you need professionals and lots of money - the roof itself will cost at least $90,000 - but there’s no cash in state coffers. Fortunately, at least for the roof repair, again there’s private help: The nonprofit New Jersey Botanical Garden/Skylands Association will pick up the expense with donations.
It’s a familiar scenario statewide, where park staff and volunteer groups strain to perform basic repairs and maintain infrastructure despite cuts to the state Natural and Historic Resources capital budget, The Record reported (https://bit.ly/2d16BXu).
Why that fund has shrunk - and how to reverse that - is a point of contention.
Some environmental groups blame a voter-approved 2014 constitutional amendment. It shifted revenues from the state’s Corporation Business Tax away from capital improvements. Instead, they bolster Green Acres, a taxpayer-financed program that has preserved more than 650,000 acres of open space in its 55 years.
But others, including NJ Keep It Green, a coalition of more than 180 environmental groups that advocated for the 2014 amendment, say the funding has been a pittance compared to what parks actually need: state estimates put the backlog of capital improvements at about $400 million. They argue that the situation is the result of decades of budgetary neglect by governors who prioritized funding their own projects instead.
And the governor’s office blames the Legislature, which it said “continues to ignore the governor’s warnings” against repurposing business tax money that supported “many crucial environmental programs.”
Meanwhile, attendance at state parks and historical sites has slowly increased: The Department of Environmental Protection, which manages the 445,000 acres of state-owned parks, forests and recreational areas, expects nearly 18.3 million visitors this year, a million more than in 2014.
State Sen. Bob Smith, a Piscataway Democrat who sponsored the bill that placed the 2014 amendment on the public ballot, called it the “holy grail” the state’s environmental movement had been looking for: a dedicated money source for continued open-space purchases.
Approved by a 65-35 percent margin by voters, the amendment earmarked about $80 million each year from the Corporation Business Tax to finance open space, farmland, and historic preservation. That total will rise in 2020 when the tax allocation increases.
Some environmentalists say the amendment had an unintended but severe impact on the Natural and Historic Resources capital budget. The budget had been replenished each year from the same tax, a dedication secured in a prior, 2006 voter-approved constitutional amendment. That amendment was to provide a “reliable and stable source of funding” that would enable the DEP to make “long-term investments in the state park system,” according to a 2013 draft of the state’s Comprehensive Outdoor Recreation Plan.
It provided about $15 million annually, and would have doubled to $32 million in 2016.
But the 2014 measure ended that dedication and canceled the planned-for increase. That, said Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, has redirected money to land acquisition instead of capital improvements at parks. “We’re buying farm fields out in Hunterdon County that the public can’t use instead of fixing state parks that the public will use,” Tittel said.
Mark Texel, head of the New Jersey Division of Parks and Forestry, called it a “massive blow” and said in a Facebook post soon after the vote that it was “the darkest day I have faced in my professional career.”
“We had a plan to really tackle some of these major capital projects that had been deferred for many, many years,” Texel said. “And we were making progress. Suddenly now our capital budget is having the legs cut out from underneath it. . It was disappointing, I admit. I was very disappointed.”
The initial cut wasn’t as deep as expected: The NHR capital budget, still funded with business tax money but now through the regular budget process, received about $16 million again in 2015. But that fell to $13.9 million for 2016, and is expected to total just $11.8 million in 2017, Texel said.
Bill Wolfe, director of the non-profit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, said he didn’t believe that voters in 2014 knew this would happen.
He accused NJ Keep It Green of “intentionally, knowingly” stripping state parks of capital funding to finance Green Acres so they wouldn’t have to ask voters to approve a bond. That, he said, let open space groups avoid a public brawl with Governor Christie, who has demanded no new debt be placed on taxpayers. The coalition, he said, “didn’t have the spine to fight for the money.”
Representatives of NJ Keep It Green tell a far different story.
Coalition coordinator Kelly Mooij said the group had lobbied for several ways to replenish Green Acres before the last of its money ran out in 2014, five years after voters approved a $400 million bond issue. It had tried to secure both a sales tax dedication and a water-user fee, but failed.
The business tax reallocation, Mooij said, was the “last in a long line of attempts to get additional funding” for Green Acres. And to say Keep It Green was only prioritizing one issue at the expense of the others is inaccurate, she said.
“We didn’t advocate for any cuts to what the DEP had been getting for capital parks improvements,” she said. “There has been a systemic underinvestment in our parks system, and also in our open space. And you cannot point to the 2014 amendment and say that is the cause of the many decades of disrepair.”
Various administrations have balked at allocating their share, she said, and reduced general fund money tagged for park improvements just as business tax revenues were pouring in. This, Mooij said, meant the parks “didn’t get the added benefits” they were supposed to. NJ Keep It Green is “strongly supportive” of state parks, she said, and recently fought for general fund money to support them.
Ed Potosnak, chairman of Keep It Green and executive director of the NJ League of Conservation Voters, said the idea that the amendment had stripped money from the parks was a “smoke and mirrors argument” by the Christie administration.
“It’s just because they’re not prioritizing it,” Potosnak said. “That money is going other places . if they thought it was important, they’d put it towards the parks. It’s not because of (the constitutional amendment). We’re seeing that slip because the administration has other priorities. And . they don’t want to say flat out, ’We have other priorities.’ They’re going to point the finger.”
For environmental groups to buy into that story is “shameful,” Potosnak said. “Stand up for full funding - don’t point the finger at other factors and play into (the state’s) narrative that is false.”
But Brian Murray, Christie’s press secretary, said the 2014 amendment hampered DEP efforts to address capital improvements and left it with “fewer funds to use for parks and other crucial environmental protection efforts.”
The governor inherited the $400 million backlog from prior administrations, Murray said, and has been working with the DEP to make parks and wildlife areas “more self-sustaining.”
But “the Legislature has vigorously opposed this administration using any portion of these funds for park improvements, or even maintenance,” Murray said.
As to how the state could bridge the budget gap, Texel, the Division of Parks and Forestry head, points to the public/private partnerships meant to monetize parks - like the gazebo built at Barnegat Lighthouse State Park to play host to wedding ceremonies, or the caterer who calls Sussex County’s Waterloo Village home. He also suggested corporate sponsorships, used effectively by the National Park Service, as a money source.
Tittel wants the state to charge more for leased public land and easements granted corporations and send that money to the park budget. Mooij and Potosnak simply want the state to fund the DEP at a higher rate; Mooij said there was no reason state residents should accept budget cuts at the DEP as normal. “We should demand more,” she said.
Potosnak agreed. “One thing shouldn’t come at the expense of the other,” he said.
But none of this is going to help the short-term dilemmas at Skylands Manor, where decomposing roofs need mending and long-vacant guest-and-groundskeeper houses should be razed.
Or at High Point State Park in Sussex County, where land around the 220-foot obelisk marking New Jersey’s highest point is cordoned off because mortar tumbles from the monument.
Or at the state forests, where the inability to replace aged equipment has made trail repairs difficult: Ed Goodell, executive director of the New York/New Jersey Trail Conference, recalls seeing a park truck whose broken gear shifter had been replaced with a PVC pipe - an example of how “held together with cobwebs and bubble gum the whole infrastructure is.”
Dyer, the Skylands volunteer, isn’t optimistic, either.
“If you get somebody from the state who cares . you could push a little easier,” Dyer said. “But we’re too far away.”
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Information from: The Record (Woodland Park, N.J.), https://www.northjersey.com
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