Spotlight Essay: Innovative Land Use Requires Work, Patience and Sacrifice

Editor's Note: The author is Candace McKee Ashmun, who has served as a member of the Pinelands Commission since its creation in 1979. She also served on the State Planning Commission and as executive director and three‑term president of the Association of New Jersey Environmental Commissions. Ashmun is a trustee of the Coalition for Affordable Housing and the Environment and vice president of the board of the Fund for New Jersey.

A small, densely populated state with an old industrial infrastructure and limited natural resources: that is New Jersey. How has such a state remained a successful economic engine and retained its nickname as the "Garden State"?

Answers to that question are many and varied. One can look at all the usual factors, proximity to markets, a variety of industrial and service-sector jobs and a skilled and well-educated workforce. People like to live and work in New Jersey. More high-income earners move into New Jersey than move out in any given time span, a testament to our state's quality of life.

Looking beyond the obvious, consider how New Jersey citizens have reached for the sky, while eschewing short-term fixes and pursuing visionary goals in ways that require work, patience and sacrifice to ensure a good and profitable future.

Protecting Resources

New Jersey voters don’t stop at building parks and buying open space. They support innovative land-use planning and regulations that protect resources; they support programs that save farmland and farmers to feed future generations; and they understand that the state’s future depends on the availability of clean air and clean water. They understand that maintaining these resources requires stringent regulation, not short-term gratification. The people of New Jersey recognize that the loss of a single species of flora or fauna is the first step to a disappearing human existence.

The key to New Jersey's success is the willingness of its people to be steadfast in protecting the local control of governmental functions, while utilizing regional and statewide planning as a framework. Just as county governments were created to provide those services that bridge the gaps between towns, state government must provide services that bridge the economic and infrastructure gaps between counties. This state has led all states in the union in applying regional solutions to the broader issues of resource protection.

New Jersey's various landscapes abound with examples of the success of regional planning. In the Meadowlands, regional planning has transformed what was once a dump into a productive development, bejeweled with restored habitat and resources serving all the residents and businesses of northeastern parts of the state. Shared property taxes --unique to New Jersey as a local control state -- have played a major role in the Meadowlands Commission’s achievement of its goals.

A state and federal partnership begun 30 years ago to manage growth in the vast coastal plain of New Jersey created the federal Pinelands National Reserve, spanning portions of seven counties and over a million acres of farms, forests and wetlands. The New Jersey Pinelands Protection Act was signed into law in 1979.

The commission created by that law was empowered to develop, keep current and implement a Comprehensive Management Plan (CMP) for land use. The plan employs a nationally recognized transfer of development rights program. Subjected to intensive monitoring, the CMP continues to protect agriculture, preserve the underlying reserves of groundwater and defend a unique ecosystem that was recognized by the United Nations as this country's first worldwide biosphere reserve.

Continue reading this story in NJ Spotlight.

NJ Spotlight is an issue-driven news website that provides critical insight to New Jersey’s communities and businesses. It is non-partisan, independent, policy-centered and community-minded.