For more than 40 years, New Jersey has led a successful campaign to save forests, wildlife, wetlands and vital open spaces for the future. But even with the campaign, we still lose 16,000 acres every year to development. The race for open space is real, and poll after poll, and vote after vote has shown that New Jerseyans strongly support preservation.

A new bill from Trenton (A2923) however, threatens to slow the pace of our preservation efforts, and grind New Jersey’s race to save open space to a crawl. The bill — a poison pill for open space — would give municipalities veto power over preservation efforts in towns that have more than 35 percent of their land in preservation. In a time when every unpaved acre in the state is threatened with sprawl development, this bill will only increase the rate at which our state gets paved.

The bill would also allow municipalities to prevent property tax exemption on preserved lands held by nonprofit conservation groups, thus skyrocketing the cost of land preservation for nonprofits. Since most nonprofits cannot afford to preserve land without tax exemption, local officials can essentially block preservation. This bill jeopardizes the future of many unprotected, sensitive and special places, and leaves them open to more pavement and more sprawling development.

To add fuel to the fire, this bill effectively prevents private landowners from selling their land for preservation, taking away an option we’ve all worked hard to promote for decades. It also prevents the state from protecting critical tracts of land that are important to a statewide network of parks and greenways.

Justification for this bill is based on the myth of the “ratables chase,” a false assumption that development generates more in local tax revenue than it costs in services. In reality, development, especially residential, has the opposite effect — costing local residents dramatically more money than it brings in.

Study after study has shown residential development costs more in services than it generates in tax revenue. With new homes and more people moving into neighborhoods, local governments must borrow money to fund capital improvements, such as schools, roads and bridges, water and sewer projects. New schools, more law enforcement, greater wear and tear on roads and other expenses wind up costing more than the revenues reaped from newcomers’ taxes.

As this “ratables chase” intensifies, more and more towns are learning the hard way as they experience higher tax rates associated with new development, and are finding out that open space is a winning ratable and helps stabilize local tax rates.

This bill plays on the fear and myth of the “ratables chase,” and jeopardizes New Jerseyans’ future quality of life and their enjoyment of open space and preserved lands and natural resources. Proponents of the bill point out that currently only a handful of municipalities would be impacted by the legislation, but that’s not so — it ignores our efforts to dramatically increase the amount of preserved land all around the state. As more land is preserved, more municipalities will fall under the jurisdiction of this “poison pill bill.”

Please contact your assembly representatives and ask them to stop A2923 dead in its tracks.

I hope you’ll contact me at info@njconservation.org or (888) 526-3728 or visit New Jersey Conservation Foundation’s Web site at www.njconservation.org for more information about conserving New Jersey’s precious land and natural resources.

Michele Byers

executive director

New Jersey Conservation Foundation

Far Hills