WASHINGTON REPORT

PRESIDENTIAL PROFILES AVAILABLE

Prompted by the lack of environmental coverage in the dominant electronic and print media, the Conservation Department at NJAS has downloaded and photocopied the League of Conservation Voters Presidential Profiles for four of the leading contenders: George W. Bush and John McCain, Al Gore and Bill Bradley. These are 8-13 page summaries of their conservation pluses and shortcomings, and include their Congressional voting records for those who have them. They have been moving briskly since we put them out in the foyer at Scherman-Hoffman Sanctuary in February. If you would like to do the Web work yourself, you can find them at the League's site: www.lcv.org .

P.S. As we go to press, we're down to Al Gore and George W. Bush. The offer still stands.

1999 NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL SCORECARD

The League of Conservation Voters also released their Scorecard for the 1st Session of the 106th Congress in February. The scores are based on 16 House votes and 9 Senate votes, with 100% being the perfect environmental score. The House average was just 46%, the Senate even worse, 41%. Senate Democrats averaged 76%, Republicans 13%. House Democrats averaged 78%, Republicans 16%. New England once again was the highest scoring region, 79% on the Senate side, 87% on the House. The Rocky Mountains/Southwest region had the lowest regional scores, 10% for the Senate and 29% for the House. These scores ought to be a dose of cold water reality for the oft repeated refrain from members of Congress that "we're all conservationists." The number of Republican Congressional leaders who scored zero is amazing testimony as to why major conservation legislation (Clean Water Act, Superfund, Endangered Species Act) is going nowhere until after the 2000 election, with perhaps one exception (see H.R. 701, CARA, below).
We offer this as context to place our own New Jersey delegation's scores in perspective: 84% average in the Senate (78% for Frank Lautenberg and 89% for Robert Torricelli, both Democrats) and 81% in the House. Democrats Frank Pallone (D-6), William Pascrell (D-8), Donald Payne (D-10), Rush Holt (D-12) and Robert Menendez (D-13) all scored 100%, while Christopher Smith (D-4) led the Republican with 75% and Bob Franks (D-7) had 69%. The two lowest scores in the New Jersey delegation belonged to Republicans Frank LoBiondo (D-2), 44% and Rodney Frelinghuysen (D-11) at 56%.
The rest of the scores in the NJ Delegation are as follows: Democrats Robert Andrews (D-1) and Steve Rothman (D-9) both scored 94% and Republicans James Saxton (D-3) and Marge Roukema (D-5) both scored 63%. We will publish these scores in "boxscore" fashion in the next edition of the magazine, for the Fall issue before the election. Our thanks to our delegation for doing so well in comparison with their colleagues.

H.R. 701/S-2123, THE CONSERVATION AND REINVESTMENT ACT (CARA)

By early March, 2000, H.R. 701, A.K.A. as CARA, a BI-partisan bill sponsored by Don Young (R, AK) and George Miller (D, CA) that would fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund and provide $350 million annually to state fish and wildlife agencies, has picked up more than 305 co-sponsors, a very impressive number, including the entire New Jersey Congressional delegation. We thank them for their support.

Full funding of the Land and Water Conservation Fund has long been a dream here at NJAS. Our hopes were raised in the late 1980's and early 1990's, especially with the end of the Cold War, but they faded soon with balanced budget pre-occupations and ideological opposition to government programs in general. But now the mood seems slightly different in Congress, and we have the best chance in several decades to bring this bill to the house floor for a successful vote. CARA would make available $2.825 billion dollars annually from existing Outer Continental Shelf oil revenues, to be redistributed as follows:

· $350 million to state fish and game agencies for wildlife conservation
education and recreation projects
· $900 million for Land and Water Conservation Fund Projects, split equally between state and federal projects
· $1 billion to 35 coastal states for Coastal conservation and impact assistance to mitigate the effects of coastal oil drilling
· $125 million for urban park and recreation systems
· $100 million for the protection of historic properties and to manage
national heritage areas and corridors
· $200 million for federal and Indian lands restoration
· $100 million for conservation easements
· $50 million for incentive programs to promote recovery of threatened and endangered species.

New Jersey's annual share of this pie should be nearly $60 million dollars. And remember: the revenue source already exists, taxes don't have to raised to provide the funds.

The bill however, is not perfect. On February 10, 2000, 16 major conservation and recreation organization wrote to Representatives Young and Miller requesting five improvements to the bill. NJAS supports these changes, the two most important of which concern reducing incentives for more offshore drilling and assuring that the money for LWC Funds is actually authorized, not just appropriated.

More good news: Bill Neil and Rich Kane represented NJAS in Washington, DC at the end of February for a Capitol steps rally for CARA and thanking the NJ delegation for their support. The breaking news while we were there (Feb. 29-Mar. 2) was that we now have a Senate version that mirrors H.R.701, S-2123, co-sponsored by Senators Frank Murkowski (R, AK), Mary Landrieu (D, LA), Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R, MS), Senator John Breaux (D, LA), and Senator Dianne Feinstein (D, CA). Senator Barbara Boxer also appeared at the Capitol rally, a sure sign that something good is in motion on the Senate side. NJAS stopped by our Senators' offices to urge them to work on the amendments mentioned above for S-2123.

DISAPPOINTING VOTE ON HORSESHOE CRAB HARVEST LIMITS

The Atlantic State Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) voted February 9, 2000, to reduce the Atlantic Coast harvest of Horseshoe Crabs by just 25% from the 1995-1997 harvest levels of 2, 999, 491 crabs. NJAS thinks the situation warrants a moratorium, which was not among the options on the table. We supported a 50% reduction, which did not carry the day, and other measures, including a closure of the federal waters harvest, 3-200 miles off the coast, a 1:1 harvest ratio between males and females, and alternate bait requirements for the conch and eel fisheries.

Governor Whitman has pledged $50,000 of NJ money towards data collection, and is asking Virginia, Maryland and Delaware to kick in comparable amounts so that the Department of the Interior could match the $200,000 states total. NJAS attended the
ASMFC's annual meeting in Mystic, Connecticut in November to argue for tougher harvest limits. Since no one really knows the size of the Atlantic seaboard population, an annual harvest of over 2,000,000 crabs seems to be a great leap of faith and a great risk if the total population turns out to be between 8-10 million crabs. We used the "Titanic" analogy, of running at full speed in known iceberg fields. NJAS believes that the Delaware Bay Population may already have crashed, which is why we see fewer crabs, less eggs and fewer migratory shore birds on NJ's Delaware Bayshore beaches. But the Commission votes seem to favor the commercial fishing interests, and the history of fisheries management shows the populations often have to really plunge, crash even, before adequate protections are put in place. We urge NJ to keeps its harvest limits in place - which translated into a harvest of 241,000 crabs in 1998.

We thank NJAS member George Dawson of New Brunswick for his fine reports and analysis of the Feb. meeting that ASMFC held in Virginia. George reports that NJ, PA, MD and the US Fish and Wildlife service were the dissenters in the13-4 vote for just a 25% reduction in harvesting - they wanted a 50% reduction. It is apparent to us that the fisheries regulatory mechanism itself needs an overhaul to better represent the public and conservation interest in species protection. The current system, not just in this particular vote, seems unbalanced in favor of commercial interests. Any takers in our Congressional Delegation?

TROUBLED WATERS: CONGRESS, THE CORPS OF ENGINEERS, AND WASTEFUL WATER PROJECTS

NJAS continues to oppose the nation's most expensive and extensive beach nourishment project - to keep a 100' wide beach along 127 miles of NJ's coast for 50 years. Estimated cost? 9 billion dollars. The project has once again made a national report called Troubled Waters, compiled by Taxpayers for Common Sense and the National Wildlife Federation and released nationwide on March 2, 2000. As a matter of fact it has made the top ten list of the most wasteful national Corps projects. It is available on the web at www.taxpayer.net or www.nwf.org. Or you can obtain a print copy for $10.00 from Taxpayers for Common Sense at 651 Pennsylvania Ave. SE, Washington, DC, 20003. (phone 202-546-8500, ext.101).

STATE REPORT

COASTAL LAW (CAFRA) REGULATIONS, REFORMS FAIL

Our Winter 1999-2000 edition took the coastal campaign reform saga up through the late summer. The culmination of this campaign turned out to be the scathing editorial printed in the Star Ledger on August 29, 1999. The title was: "A sham attempt to stop Shore sprawl." The Ledger went on to say that:

…these regulations are a fraud. They won't limit sprawl. The phrase 'too little, too late' was made for a moment like this… the loopholes are in the law, so the Legislature deserves the slap on this one. Whitman is a silent accomplice who is pretending this doesn't demolish efforts to limit sprawl.

Then the public campaign went south, and the media reporting went with it. Discussions dragged on behind the scenes between conservationists and DEP land-use staff and representatives from the Governor's policy office, in an attempt to strengthen the Department of Environmental Protection's (DEP) rules, and to get the Governor to campaign with us to close the legislative loophole that allows builders to construct 24 housing units or less with no state scrutiny. The disappointing results of these negotiations are expressed in one of our NJAS Opinion pieces in this issue, the letter to Governor Whitman dated January 28, 2000.

NJAS has recommended to our conservation community that we think about seeking funds for our own advertising campaign, for example, to widely publish the letter to Governor Whitman. We say this because even when we did hold a coastal press conference in February, 2000 to tell the public the outcome on the rule struggle and share the letter, our message was widely ignored. But some of it is our own fault as a community. This writer was struck by the analysis by the Star Ledger columnist John Farmer (Monday Morning in the Nation, March 6, 2000) of what was missing in the Bill Bradley Presidential campaign, because it captured pretty well what we failed to ignite, and would have had to ignite among the public and press, to win genuine coastal reforms:

What Bradley's campaign represented was nothing less than a revolt- not an ordinary revolt, but one against a successful president presiding over the most buoyant economy in the nation's history. It was a reach for the sky politically and it required a rhetoric to match… It required language that would call people to, as John McCain put it memorably, 'something bigger than ourselves.'… It requires real boldness and language that inspires, in effect, a call to arms. Bradley had neither.

Our conservation efforts on coastal reform also call to mind the military insight passed on at West Point, the post mortem on a battle that didn't go very well for General Custer at the Little Big Horn in 1876: never divide your forces in the face of a numerically superior foe. At the same time conservationists were trying to win a very difficult campaign against the power of the builders at the coast, they were also trying simultaneously to wage the following struggles: a Clean Water Campaign, an Ocean Dumping-Dredging campaign, an Barnegat Bay estuary study, a new designation under the State Plan for the Highland Region, new shifts in State Plan Planning Areas, Cape May 20 year Sewer Rules… new regional watershed studies and several different, sometimes overlapping water rule revision processes… plus all the local and county site contests that come up with 566 and 21 different jurisdictions, respectively.

NJAS did testify in Trenton on February 25, 2000, on the final amendments to the coastal rules. If you would like a copy, give us a call at 908-766-6446.

If any of you are, or know, one of the new Internet millionaires who is looking for a good public interest cause to "invest" in, by all means contact us at the above numbers.

The Peninsula Campaign: Cape May Under Siege

Closely intertwined with the campaign to get stronger coastal rules and to close the loophole is the struggle to save Cape May's hemispherically important natural resources, which are important to millions of migrating birds who depend on the them for their resting, feeding and watering needs. The natural resources of the peninsula are also important to the Cape May County freeholders, state and regional legislators, but for different reasons.

The Cape May freeholders ignored the pleas of citizens who turned out in record numbers to protest their 20 year sewer plan for the County in July, 1999, the one that might ratify as many as 51,000 new housing units, county-wide. That Plan has been put on hold at the NJDEP, and we expect to know the extent of the revisions later this spring.

On February 8, 2000, conservationists signed a letter to Assemblyman Jack Gibson (R, D-1), who is the prime sponsor of A-648, a bill that would provide $7.6 million dollars to study the ecological impacts to the Pinelands of water withdrawals from the Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer which underlies it. Conservationists declined to support the bill because it looks too narrowly at the ecological impacts and fails to address the levels of coastal growth which have been impacting the aquifer for decades. They invited the Assemblyman to co-sponsor legislation to close the CAFRA loophole, and to work with us to get Governor Whitman to strengthen the CAFRA regulations. So far he hasn't taken us up on the request. Two Democratic legislators have listened to us and incorporated most of our suggestions to close the loophole into legislation. Assemblyman Reed Gusciora (D, D-15) is the sponsor of A- 193 and Senator John Adler (D, D-6) is the sponsor of the Senate version, S-298. So far we can detect no enthusiasm for the bills on the Republican side of the isle, or for that matter, among the Democratic leadership.

Assemblyman Gibson along with the other Republican Assemblyman from District 1, Nicholas Asselta, is also the co-sponsor of Assembly Resolution 89, the mirror image of Senate Resolution 24, co-sponsored by District 1 Senator James Cafiero and Senate President Donald DiFrancesco (R, D-22), who is one of the leading Republican candidates for Governor. The Senate Resolution, which passed in February, 2000, urges the Commissioner of Transportation to "consider the completion of Rt. 55 as a major priority project… to be funded… for the forthcoming fiscal year." The resolution candidly admits that Rt. 55, will, among other things, "enhance opportunities for economic development in Cumberland and Cape May County." Our readers should know that because of the direct environmental impacts of the project to wetlands and other environmentally sensitive lands, and the secondary growth inducing impacts, this road expansion has long been on our "worst nightmare" list for the Cape May peninsula.

And finally, we include Republican state Senator William Gormley on our list of regional leaders who are having a negative impact on protecting the natural resources of the Cape May peninsula, even though he represents District 2 to the northeast, Atlantic County. We say this because Senator Gormley was the sponsor of Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 133, which passed the Senate on November 15, 1999, by a whopping vote of 27-6. This resolution said that the DEP's coastal rules exceeded the intent of the Legislature in carrying out the CAFRA reforms of 1993, which only called for the rules being "closely coordinated" with the values of the State Plan, such as it is. Now one can argue for a long time over whether Senate Gormley is right about legislative intent and the rules. But that is not the real issue here. After all, the Senator might have sponsored a resolution that stated that the DEP coastal rules were not protective enough, and then co-sponsored Senate Adler's bill to close the loophole.

In conversations we have had with the Senator, once he gets over his anger at us for having called him Senator Sprawl, it is clear that the Senator's real intent is to restrain the regulatory power of the DEP, weak as it is, over the local and county officials that the Senator has so much confidence in, and he feels land-use at the coast would be fine if only the State would get them a little more planning money. It is also clear to us that the Senator sees himself as a good environmentalist, even though his claims for that seem to dwell on things he has done decades ago.

Senator Gormley clearly has cast his current lot with the local forces calling for ever more economic development at the coast. The fact that he can have such faith in local officials, given the performance of the Cape May freeholders, is not a comforting thought. The Senator, with his support for the continued expansion of the Casino industry in Atlantic City, must share some of the blame for the residential building pressures on the upper Cape May peninsula. The majority of the new casino workers won't be living in Atlantic City itself, as the State Plan would seem to call for, they'll be seeking homes close to the wonderful natural resources in the more rural areas of the coast. The fact that these coastal legislators attack rules from those "bad" bureaucrats in Trenton, while being only to happy to take state money from Trenton (highway tunnel to serve new casino in Atlantic City - worth hundreds of millions of dollars) and even federal money (for loans for the desalinization plant in Cape May - joint state and federal funding) when needed to service their economic interests, needs to get more attention. Meanwhile true coastal reform looks like it will have to wait until a new Governor arrives.
We think these legislators need to hear from you now, and how strongly you value the remaining Cape May habitats. They need to know that you, as a conservationist, see them as the responsible, collaborating parties for threatening to impair the remaining coastal habitats. You can contact them at the following numbers and e-mail addresses:

Phone E-mail

Senator James Cafiero: 609-522-0462 sencafiero@njleg.state.nj.us

Assem. Nicholas Asselta: 856-691-3004 asmasselta@njleg.state.nj.us

Assem. Jack Gibson: 609-624-1222 asgibson@njleg.state.nj.us

Senator William Gormley: 609-646-3500 sengormley@njleg.state.nj.us

Senator Donald DiFrancesco: 908-322-5500 sendifrancesco@njleg.state.nj.us