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Christie Plan To Abolish D&R Canal Commission Draws Fire

April 29th, 2011 4 comments
Women jog along D&R Canal in Kingwood

Women jog along D&R Canal in Kingwood

Christie is not King and may not unilaterally abolish legislatively created entities

[Update: 5/16/11 – Looks like the battle is just beginning. NJ Spotlight reports: D&R Canal Commission Doesn’t Plan to Go Quietly — or at All. Low-profile state agency resolves to fight administration’s recommendation to abolish it – end update]

The 70 mile long D&R Canal is the most heavily used NJ State Park and one of the finest linear parks in the Country. It provides a spectacular recreational green space through 19 central Jersey towns and has tremendous historical and natural resource values.

The Canal itself provides 100 million gallons per day of drinking water, supplying about 20% of NJ’s drinking water to 4 counties.

The Canal is overseen by the D&R Canal Commission, which was created by the Legislature in 1974 in order to plan for and protect the special scenic, recreational, historic, cultural and natural resources of the Canal and its regional character.

To accomplish that mission established by the Legislature, the Commission implements land use regulations for development projects in the Canal zone. Those regulations are more stringent than their counterparts at DEP, in terms of protection of stream buffers, water quality, historic resources, and stormwater management.

In addition, the Commission’s reviews of nearby development consider the special landscape, design, and aesthetic considerations of a linear park, particulalry preservation of the visual character that is so vital to the recrational experiences enjoyed by thousands of people on a daily basis.

The Commission has done a superb job, has not cost the taxpayers one penny to operate, and has attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in private investment that has benefitted from the locational assets of the Canal.

The Commisison’s work is unique, mandated by law, and does not duplicate and can not be replaced by DEP. In fact, DEP reviews would be insensitive to and actually harm critical Canal values. DEP’s bureacracy would be unresponsive to Canal users.

Unique among all State Agencies, the Commission is strongly supported by thousands of residents, hikers, bicyclists, canoeists, kayakers, fishermen, birders, historic preservationists, artists, environmentalists, local businesses, and the development community.

This is an incredible success story – and no one publicly opposes the Commission.

So why on earth did DEP Commissioner Martin recommend that the Commission be abolished?

We wrote about that back on September 19, 2010 – see: Christie Dismantling Underway – A Look at DEP Targets

Since then, months of  behind the scenes private efforts to convince Martin to reverse his decision have failed.

So, based on tremendous public opposition by Canal supporters, yesterday, the Legislature publicly asked that embarrrassing question too.

For coverage of the hearing (which I attended, but was unable to speak because no public testimony was allowed) read Tom Johnson’s great story at NJ Spotlight: Delaware and Raritan Canal Commission Down to One Employee  – Commission is one of more than 60 agencies targeted for elimination by Christie administration.

Ernie Hahn, Director of D&R Canal Commission. Ernie has had a stellar career, including DEP Assistant Commissioner for Land Use and leadership of NJ's Freshwater Wetlands Act programs.

Ernie Hahn, Director of D&R Canal Commission. Ernie has had a stellar career, including DEP Assistant Commissioner for Land Use and leadership of NJ's Freshwater Wetlands Act programs.

You can listen to the compelling testimony by all 3 Commissioners and Director Ernie Hahn by clicking this link .

The recommendation to abolish D&R Canal Commission was made to Governor Christie by DEP Commissioner Martin last September.

Governor Christie’s Executive Order No. 15, issued in May 2010, required each state agency to review and make recommendations to eliminate various authorities.

So now that the facts are out to show just how ill advised the recommendation to abolish the D&R Canal Commission was, Martin is digging in and having problems saving face.

Worse, he not only refuses to reconsider the recommendation to abolish the Commission and transfer back the Commission staff he stole, Martin now is dictating who will replace the Director of the Commission after current Director Ernie Hahn retires in May (and for Ernie to be treated this shabbily at the end of a stellar career of public service is a disgrace).

This is a perfect illustration of both Martin’s incompetence and arrogance, and the ideological recklessness of Governor Christie.

Christie is not a King and is not empowered to unilaterally abolish legislatively created entities.

The Legislature can and must reverse the Martin decision in budget language.

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Senator Sarlo Pulls a Trump on RGGI

April 28th, 2011 No comments

Political Lying Becoming the New Normal Under Christie’s Leadership

Senator Paul Sarlo (D-Bergen) joins TeaParty attack on global warming laws.

Senator Paul Sarlo (D-Bergen) joins TeaParty attack on global warming laws.

[Updates below]

Donald Trump is looking like a real Chump for joining the birthers in what a NY Times editorial today described as

a profoundly low and debasing moment in American political life.

I agree.

But the NY Times left out the fact that that “debasing moment” was aided and abetted by the “balanced” media.

The media – for far too long – have given legitimacy to falsehoods by reporting the false claims of ideologues as “he said/she said” stories, ranging from the birthers, to global warming deniers, and intelligent design religious fundamentalists who reject Darwinian evolution as fraud.

Although this is a political, policy, and media disgrace of national scope, Governor Chris Christie has broken new rhetorical  ground here in NJ, while, on the policy front, quietly shredding the state’s global warming programs .

But not to be outdone by The Donald, Christie, and the Birthers, NJ State Senator Paul Sarlo has joined the Liars Club.

Last week, Sarlo publicly stood with the Koch Brother’s billionare funded TeaBaggers (Americans for Prosperity)and assorted global warming deniers in attacking the ten northeastern states’ Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI).

Today the Bergen Record reported the story: Many turn out at rally to end NJ’s participation in regional cap and trade agreement

The headline could have been “Many say Earth is Flat”, but this particulalry egregious (and unrebuted) lie caught my eye:

Steve Lonegan said the cap and trade program created by RGGI “is designed to further undermine the economic prosperity of this nation.”

“What will you give up as your electricity rates double over the next few years?” he asked.

A few easily researchable facts destroy this lie. In addition to the statutory cap on RGGI charges, for example, here is the BPU breakdown of NJ electric rates.

Note that the total RGGI component accounts for 0.041 cent per kilowatt hour (that’s 41 one thousands of a penny), while the typical rate is 16.74 cents per kilowatt hour.

The RGGI charges amount to 0.24% of your electric bill. So if your bill is $100 per month, then RGGI accounts for 24 cents per month.

The Record has written several excellent substantive articles on RGGI, by former reporter Alex Nussbaum.

As Nussbaum has reported, the facts of the matter are that RGGI charges are far too LOW to change energy demand or provide economic incentives for renewable energy alternatives, and that the so called “caps” allow emissions to INCREASE! (see this Nussbaum story also: Limits could let pollution levels rise (12/26/07)

If current reporters can’t pick up a phone to call knowledgeable experts or even do a basic Google, one would assume that they at least check in with Record archives to get educated on a story before writing. Especially when Lonegan or TeaParty activists are involved as “news sources”, if only because they have a well known political agenda and neither have much of a track record for credibility on public policy issues.

So Record editors should be ashamed for publishing a piece that relies on stenographic reporting of lies by Steve Lonegan, a source with about as much credibility on complex policy issues as a typical right wing smear artist.

Please don’t ask me to back that up with evidence, I don’t have the time because there are too many recent examples to refer to.

So let me take the easy way out: for a superb historical overview of the problem, read Rick Perlstein’s essay: Inside the GOP’s Fact-Free Nation – From Nixon’s plumbers to James O’Keefe’s video smears: How political lying became normal.

NJ Democratic Senator Paul Sarlo can now join the Political Liars Club and become part of the “New Normal”.

Oh, and did I mention that the billionaire Koch Brothers are behind attacks on clean air and global warming, including the failed effort to gut California’s global warming law, AB32?

Or that Koch Brothers billions are what formed and fuels the TeaBagger “movement”?

The fact that these critical relevant contextual background facts were omittted from the Record story makes it an even more absurd example of puerile journalism.

[Update #2: May 8, 2011 – More legislators jumping on Koch Teaparty bandwagon, including my State Senator (Doherty): State senators seeking to ratchet up movement to repeal emissions pact]

Update#1: May 2, 2011 – Star Ledger editorial nails Christie on RGGI and Lonegan on his lie: Gov. Chris Christie shouldn’t consider a retreat on global warming

However, they got one important point significantly wrong. The Ledger wrote:

The pact suggests that states use at least 25 percent of the proceeds for that purpose.
The rest could be used to help balance the budget.

This gets is backwards. It is technically correct that the RGGI pact suggests state use at least 25% – BUT, in 2008, NJ passed a stricter state law, kown as “The Global Warming Solutions Fund Act “.  Here’s the legislative policy on uses of the money:

The Legislature thereor determines that is is in the public interest to establish as program that authorizes the State to dedicate to consumer benefit purposes up to 100% of the revenues derived from the [RGGI] auction or other sale of allowances pursuant to an emissions allowance trading program 

Evironmentalists sought to have 100% of RGGI auction proceeds dedicated. They did not win that issue, but regardless, a policy “up to 100%” in NJ State law is far stronger than the floor minimum 25% in a 10 state RGGI agreement. End update]

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Now and Then (from Wallace to Christie)

April 27th, 2011 No comments
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April 27th, 2011 No comments

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The Dialectic of Red Tape (or Waive This!)

April 25th, 2011 No comments
John Hutchinson, hearing officer at DEP Waiver rule public hearing. Before recently joining DEP, Hutchinson was Lt. Governor Guadagno's brains. He gets bonus points for not using a water bottle, but his "Eco logic" is highly suspect.

John Hutchinson, hearing officer at DEP Waiver rule public hearing. Before recently joining DEP, Hutchinson was Lt. Governor Guadagno’s brains. He gets bonus points for not using a water bottle, but his “Eco logic” is highly suspect.

Radical Proposal an Assault on the Environment, Rule of Law, and Democracy

[Update #5 – 9/21/11 – DEP “waiver rule” based on Christie EO #2, finally triggers legislative oversight and gets slammed: Senate panel moves against Christie environmental plans

Bill Wolfe, head of New Jersey Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, predicted that every applicant before the DEP would apply for a waiver, increasing the burden on an agency trying to focus its resources on the biggest issues.

“This [waiver] makes the DEP workload go through the roof,” said Wolfe, a former employee of the agency.

Update # 4: 9/1/11 – AC Press killer editorial: DEP regulations / Kill the waiver rule

In giving itself the discretion to decide which regulations it will enforce, the DEP opens the regulatory process to a potential onslaught of lobbying and litigation. It creates a situation where well-connected developers could receive waivers out of public view, and it means politics could play a greater role than science when environmental decisions are made.

Lawmakers have already allowed for waivers in many environmental laws. In each case, the Legislature has decided that a waiver may be appropriate in specific situations. That is how the system should work.

If the Christie administration thinks that specific environmental regulations are too burdensome, it should propose revisions and hold public hearings.

The bottom line is that the DEP simply doesn’t have the authority to give itself this kind of power. And the Legislature should move immediately to remind administration officials of that.

Update 3: 5/10/11 – File this one under “N” for “No kidding”: NJ’s business climate woes are perceptual, not real, says state marketing head

Update 2 – I got a hoot reading this this morning I met with and warned my colleagues about exactly these problems when DEP began the Staekholder processes, over a year ago: Environmental groups complain of being outnumbered by ‘special interests’ at DEP meetings

Update 1: and while we’re on the topic of The Enlightenment, here’s a real enlightened statement by Governor Christie. Christie goes all Spiro Agnew on us, revealing his deep ignorance, anti-intellectualism, and disdain for Democracy (which he calls a “circus”):

“It never ceases to amaze me” said the Governor, “the outrageous things that liberal academics in ivory towers are willing to say to try to preserve their failed status quo- and that is disgusting…he should be ashamed of himself.”

Christie added “but I’m not the least bit surprised, because I’ve been dealing with these type of liberal ivory tower academics who are completely in the tank for their liberal causes for my entire career…I guess they wanted to give the liberal academic in the ivory tower a chance to grand-stand – to try to vilify the administration…I am doing what I promised I would do to the people of New Jersey, which is examine every area of government that I could, to try to find savings where services could still be provided, and to keep their taxes lower…the public understands that these circuses they hold down at the Legislature – nobody cares, nobody.”

We started writing this post about DEP’s proposed “waiver rule” last Friday, but were interrupted by the Newsflash that Christie’s DEP’s supported fracking, despite public demands that the current moratorium by the Delaware River Basin Commission remain in place.

Ironically, just like Obama’s support for off shore drilling just weeks before the BP Gulf blowout, DEP’s support came just days before a fracking blowout, forcing Chesapeake Energy to suspend all fracking in Pennsylvania.

I then went on a General Strike during Earth Week to avoid all the bullshit (but Todd Bates got the context right: Environmental disasters cast pall on Earth Day).

Anyway, in the intervening time, several news stories and scathing editorials were written (“DEP Waiver – A Foolish Proposal”  and “As they like it: if DEP gets to choose when to apply the rules, more will get bent , so I thought I’d go in a different direction today.

Let’s examine the waiver rule from what I will call the lense of the Dialectic of Red Tape.

Dialectical reasoning is a very old idea, the objective being the pursuit of truth via competing rational arguments.

But modern philosophy has given the dialectic a different meaning, having to do with the nature of the historical process and reality itself.

I certainly am no philosopher, but my superficial understanding is a dialectical dynamic unfolds when an idea contains contradictions, which ultimately become the seeds of its own destruction.

Here’s a superb illustration that can be crudely applied to Christie Red Tape/waiver thinking, from Morris Berman’s “The Twilight of American Culture” (a great book I I just happened to re-read yesterday – boldface and links are mine):

The matter of “what went wrong” has intrigued a number of great twentieth century thinkers and critics of technology, … but it probably received its most detailed expression in the work of the Frankfurt School for Social Research – that of Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno in particular, and its American representative, Herbert Marcuse. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment, … [they] argued that Enlightenment thought slowly got transmuted into scientism and positivism. In this scheme of things, everything got objectified; only that which was measurable and empirical was regarded as real. The logical endpoint of this is a purely technocratic Weltanschauung, the vision of a totally administered world. The original freshness and strength of Enlightenment thought was its critical element; but as it became a tool of the existing social and political order, it started to convert the positive values it was elected to defend into “something negative and destructive”. So if political freedom is inseperable from Enlightenment thought, that thought nevertheless contained the seeds of a reversal. For modernity eventually issued out into the commercial society, which became a metaphysics in its own right. “The consumer”, concluded Horkheimer and Adorno, “becomes the ideology of the pleasure industry, whose institutions he cannot escape.” And in fact, utilitarianism is the real, and pervasive (if invisible) philosophy of American society, a society in which very little has value in and of itself. (@page 107)

… Horkheimer and Adorno … make a distinction between a “good” Enlightenment and a “bad” one. The former is the Age of Reason, the world of Hume and Voltaire, which gave us our notions of critical analysis. The latter is the modern obsession with quantification, control, and the domination of the natural world. Human power over nature increased – we call this “progress” – but so did alienation from our natural environment and from the world of meaning and value. This alienation, in turn, impelled us to seek more power, which led to more alienation, and so on. “Progress” finally became an exercise in frustration, what the German sociologist Max Weber characterized both as the “disenchantment of the world” and the “iron cage” of industrial society. Underneath it all  … is an unconscious neurotic fantasy, the dream of absolute power over everything. In our own time, it means that cans of Coca-Cola must penetrate into the most remote villages of Africa, along with satellite television and Nike running shoes.” (@ page 114)

So lets look at the Christie Administration’s waiver rule as the result of a dialectical process.

The DEP’s radical “waiver rule” proposal is the logical culmination of the Christie Administration’s policy.

That policy – hopefully containing the seeds of its own destruction – is designed to serve “the commercial society”, whose members are viewed as “customers” by DEP Commissioner Martin, a man obsessed with power and control, who is alienated from and devoid of any substantive understanding of the natural environment.

It is driven by cost benefit analysis, an amoral technique of quantification that knows only narrow economic values, a fundamental expression of utlitarianism.

[Update: the waiver proposal is riddled with contradictions. Examples:

After all, if you see the Governor as a modern King, consider law and regulation as barriers to economic development, and view democratic processes as allowing the rabble to meddle in private corporate affairs, what could be better than giving the DEP Commissioner sole power to waive any rule?

In Christie Bizarro world, we are a Nation of Men, not laws!

In one swoop, it eliminates the problems of government oversight and a meddlesome public, and without all the headaches of legislative authorization and careful regulatory reform, which are a lot of work!

The Christie policy is based on a fetid stew of warped values and priorities, false premises, and bad information.

The key features of what I dub the Christie ideological stew are:

  • market fundamentalism (“free markets” make better choices than government intervention);
  • anti-government and anti-regulatory animus (government “red tape” and regulations stifle innovation, increase costs, and slow economic growth);
  • rejection of the public sphere and commons (the “public” is a parasite and drag on the productive private class. The commons should be privatized to get rid of free loading parasites);
  • perverse values and priorities (short term economic gains are more important than preservation of the remaining vestiges of the natural sphere or protection of “public health”.
  • Government should promote economic activity (e.g. privatization) and get out of the way of economic “progress” (e.g. deregulation); and
  • DEP over-regulation is the cause of economic recession and is hampering private investment and recovery

Aside from a few slogans (like “culture change at DEP” and “common sense regulation“), the Christie Administration has made no real effort to mask this policy.

As we have rigorously documented here for over 18 months, it began in the 2009 Gubernatorial campaign platform.

Following the election, it was expanded upon in the DEP Transition Report and codified in Executive Orders.

The programmatic road map was further fleshed out in the Red Tape Report.

And for the current phase, former Lt. Governor staffer, John Hutchinson, who wrote the Red Tape script, has moved into DEP to implement those policies.

None of this is any secret – and it should not have taken the NJ environmental community 18 months to wake up and understand the nature and magnitude of the threat.

After over a year of challenging Christie policy, back in January, we warned that “Shoes Drop in 2011, As DEP Implements Christie “Regulatory Relief” Policy.

One of the “shoes” I included on the list of “Kills in Progress” in 2011 was the waiver rule DEP held a public hearing on yesterday.

For the last 18 months, instead of circling the wagons to mount a defense against the Christie onslaught, they have played various naive and/or selfish political games.

Dave Pringle, NJEF, speaks to oppose DEP waiver proposal. When will NJEF revoke their Christie endorsement?

Dave Pringle, NJEF, speaks to oppose DEP waiver proposal. When will NJEF revoke their Christie endorsement?

Instead of educating the public and media, cultivating legislative support, and recruiting activists, they have wasted time and resources in useless insider “Stakeholder processes”.

DEP even held a Stakeholder process on the waiver rule – that’s like consulting lambs about the design of the slaughterhouse.

As a result, Christie and his hatchet man DEP Commissioner Bob Martin, have built momentum and a reservoir of credibility. Virtually none of their warped values, perverse priorities, or flawed premises have been challenged or exposed. In fact, they have been reinforced and are now considered accepted wisdom in many quarters of the legislature, media, and court of public opinion.

While it is a good sign that a dialectic dynamic of opposition finally may be emerging as a result of the gross over-reach of this waiver proposal, why has it taken so long to emerge?

It was far too long in coming, but the battle lines appear now to have been drawn.

We should never have arrived at this place. I fear great setbacks are on the horizon.

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