A Citizen’s Letter To Murphy DEP Commissioner LaTourette And Division of Parks And Forests
Get Out Of The Office, See What’s Going On, Do Your Job, Enforce The Law
Protect Public Land, State Parks And Forests!
Here we go again! You have wasted time, effort and money to make no decision about what to do with Wharton. You just kicked decades of destruction down the road for another decade, or is it until you can collect your pension and not be bothered anymore. We do not need statics about what people want and where they travel. What is needed is you people, all of you, to put your boots and get your feet on the ground so you can feel the land and gain some compassion for it, not watch it from you desk top. Come to Wharton for a couple of days and have the Supt. show you what is going on there.
The following is a letter from a Citizen to Murphy DEP Commissioner LaTourette, Assistant Commissioner Cecil, and Managers of the DEP Division of Parks And Forests regarding DEP’s total failure to protect public lands from destruction by off road vehicles. For some photos of what is going on, see:
I present it in full (without the author’s knowledge or approval), because I agree with it and it is a powerful condemnation that needs to go viral and prompt DEP to get off their asses and protect public lands:
John Cecil, Robin Madden, Shawn LaTourette, George Fedorczk and Rebecca Fitzgerald:
Here we go again! You have wasted time, effort and money to make no decision about what to do with Wharton. You just kicked decades of destruction down the road for another decade, or is it until you can collect your pension and not be bothered anymore. We do not need statics about what people want and where they travel. What is needed is you people, all of you, to put your boots and get your feet on the ground so you can feel the land and gain some compassion for it, not watch it from you desk top. Come to Wharton for a couple of days and have the Supt. show you what is going on there. I would be more than happy to take you on a tour of the entire Pinelands and I don’t care what it cost me in time and money. You need to get out away from your desk and screens and get out into the real world. There are huge problems and once you see them if you do not act once you see them then you have no understanding of preservation and conservation. You are grown ups, act like them. You have made this issue political. Conserved land is not a political issue. It is just the land, we will only have it once, it belongs to all the people of NJ not just the 1200 or so responds you got to your survey.
You can’t leave the management of our public lands up to the public. There are 9+ million citizens of NJ, all of whom have a stake in our public lands. How can you get a consensus from the all of that? You can’t get a consensus from 1200 people either, you can’t even get a consensus from just two people most times. It is like herding cats!
Get the courage and back bone to do what you are being paid to do……make decisions on how to protect the land and do it so people can enjoy our public lands and saved in perpetuity. Your job is the protect and enhance our public lands and so far you have done neither.
Get the Park Police to do their job for gods sake. Everyone knows where the problems are but no one will confront them. It is not that hard. I have suggested many ways to start to contain the ORV issues that does not take a lot of effort, but no one listens. There are not enough Park Police. Get more, but get more that have a concern for the environment rather than sit their vehicles looking for speeders on highways that border the state parks. Stop wasting money on over time, just hire some one permanently with those funds.
Get the courage to get your budget substantially increased. The budget for each park is nothing more than some people’s landscaping annual cost. How can you manage 125,000 acres on chump change?
Wharton is the largest state park and it is a disgrace! You should be ashamed of what is going on there. You do nothing to prevent it. Wharton is not the only problem, all of the Pinelands state parks and WMA’s are a mess. You can’t just key on Wharton and think everything is going to go away
The ORV people are the only one’s that have full access to our parks. All the while they are destroying wetlands, ancient paleo dunes and gravel elevations, the interior road systems. I recently watched Jeeps driving of gravel deposits placed in the park for maintenance to the roads, and driving around in little tight circles that they call donuts. ORVers consider this childish behavior fun, family fun, at that. They are the largest group to respond to your surveys. The are organized and have had total run of our public lands and do whatever they care to. You think they are not going to raise hell when you put restrictions on them so we can save our public lands? The general public is prevented from enjoying our natural areas because they can’t get there due to ORV destruction, the roads are horrible, there is no signage and no maps, just nothing helpful! How hard is this to rectify these simple things????
Enforce the laws! Just do it! Get the wherewithal do something right for a change and stop wasting our time and money just so you don’t have to hear complaints from the ORV groups and the politicians they complaint to as soon as something comes up they don’t agree with. Do your jobs! The ORVers are abusers not users, treat them as such.
You have let them in bed with you and now you don’t know how to kick them out.
If you can’t do your job, or don’t enjoy it, then find a more suitable occupation. You have a responsibility to the citizens of NJ you need to do the right thing, they are trusting you to manage their public lands not wasting time herding cats!
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