Dear Mayor Fulop
You Need To Talk to Your So Called “Green” Friends
[With End Note]
I get regular email blasts from Mayor Fulop – obviously part of laying the groundwork for his run for Governor.
His note this morning on State Parks “Your Help Needed to Protect NJ’s Parks” was a great expansion in the scope of his leadership, from the good works defending Liberty State Park to threats to all of NJ’s State Parks.
Fulop correctly noted that “these irreplaceable assets are threatened by privatization, commercialization, and development” – but he left out the punch line: “as a result of Governor Christie’s “Sustainable Parks” policy”.
But Fulop got it wrong by ignoring the biggest threat to NJ’s State Parks – the diversion of their entire capital maintenance budget by the Keep It Green’s Open Space initiative!
Since Fulop is running for Governor, it is important that he a least get the facts right – and if he’s going to weigh in on environmental policy, he needs to know that some of his so called “green” friends and advisors can’t be trusted and are selfish ass covering bastards.
So I sent him this note:
Dear Mayor Fulop:
Thank you for your leadership on Liberty State Park, but are you aware that perhaps the biggest threat to our State Parks is the diversion of the entire State Parks capital maintenance budget to the Open Space fund by the recent Constitutional amendment?
Passage of the open space ballot prompted State Park Director Mark Texel to write this note to the Keep It Green Coalition that spent $700,000 or more promoting the ballot question:
“As the Director of the NJ State Park Service now coping with the reality that our entire Parks capital budget will be completely eliminated beginning July 1, 2015 as a result of the YES vote I can say this is the darkest day I have faced in my professional career. Worse than Superstorm Sandy. 440,000+ acres of preserved open space, 52 historic sites, 39 parks — used by 8 million visitors each year — all managed by my agency and now with no funding plan in place for stewardship beginning in just 7 months. This is not a bad reality TV show. This is New Jersey’s Inconvenient Truth hidden from voters throughout this campaign.”
You need to talk to your so called “green” friends – they are misleading you. You break it, you own it.
Bill Wolfe
Bordentown, NJ
[End Note: Of course, I don’t expect a guy running for Governor to tell the whole truth, but I am not so politically constrained. Fulop failed to mention that the Governor’s Liberty State Park scheme was promoted by the accommodationist corporate planning group called NJ Future, who were bought and paid for by a Christie DEP $140,000 grant to prepare a privatization plan in secret. But NJ Future is not the only private group Christie’s DEP has outsourced work to and co-opted with State taxpayer money. There are others shamefully providing political cover in exchange for State money, including Sustainable NJ, NJ Audubon Society, and American Littoral Society. Or that some of the environmental groups that jumped on the Save Liberty State Park bandwagon previously supported the Keep It Green diversion – the definition of self serving hypocrisy.
But the Christie Administration is not alone in these cynical co-optation tactics – EPA plays a similar game and with some of the same groups and people.]