The August sun burned over the surface of the water as the boat steered through the channel.
Riverkeeper Bill Sheehan acted as tour guide for the floating press conference as lines of tall-necked white feathered egrets stood among the reeds.
It was a picture-perfect day for what Sheehan called “an ego tour,” although on this day, Aug. 20, the show was all Rep. Steve Rothman – who had lured the press into the middle of the wilderness to make an announcement many local environmentalists thought they would never hear.
During the hour-and-a-half tour of the Meadowlands, Rothman said public trusts will own 90 percent of the targeted Meadowlands acreage by the end of 2003 and 100 percent by early next year. Thus, the land can be used for a nature preserve.
“We’re now in the process of using the federal money we get every year [that is] matched by the Meadowlands Commission for land acquisition,” he said. “We will hopefully have all of the 8,400 acres by this time in 2004. In the meantime, we have will have already begun to clean up some of the toxic sites and leeching landfills that have been polluting these waters for years.”
Dressed in short sleeves and short pants, Rothman talked about the vanishing wilderness where he grew up. He also explained why he was so enthusiastic about preserving the Meadowlands – which he said would some day become a park.
Money for the purchases came from a number of sources, including state and federal governments, the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission, and not-for-profit environmental groups. But money or not, Rothman said no one on either side of the debate over development in the Meadowlands would have predicted this accomplishment even as late as four or five years ago.
Rothman brought the power of Congress to the preservation fight
“I was born and raised in Bergen County, and while I’m doing a lot to save the Passaic river, we’re talking about the Hackensack River here,” he said, waving his hands towards one shore or other, pointing out sunning turtles or the hosts of other birds that had come to call the Meadowlands their home.
“About six and a half years ago, when I was running for Congress for the first time, there was a proposal called the Mills proposal to fill in 200 acres of wetlands in heart of Hackensack Meadowlands,” he said. “The Meadowlands are about 8,400 acres in total. The river is about 1,600 acres. They wanted core property to develop for hotel and retail uses.”
The Mills people, in order to convince Rothman of the uselessness of the meadows, took him on a tour of the waterway, and Rothman said he was struck by the beauty of the place and convinced it should not be developed.
“Shortly thereafter and having got elected, I met Bill [Sheehan, who works with a national environmental group called Riverkeeper], and he took me on a tour of the river, and my eyes were opened,” he said. “My visceral sense [is that] we live in a densely populated state and region. We have enough malls. Enough is enough. There are certainly better places to put shopping malls. After taking the tour with Bill and learning about the history of the area and learning about the magnificence of the area, I decided we needed to do something to preserve this. You will see species of birds you didn’t know existed around here, and there is plenty of fish life and water life coming back.”
He added, “It became obvious to me that this was such a jewel, such an incredible educational, recreational and spiritual place, that I was going to do everything in my power to try to preserve it. And so, with Bill’s help and members of the environmental community, we drafted up a map and drew a line around 8,400 acres and said we were going to stop anybody from developing these acres. We would do whatever it takes.”
No easy chore
Rothman said the last six and a half years has not been easy, even if he came in later than many environmentalists.
“There are plenty of people you can imagine from all segments of the community, from business and from labor, to local officials worried about ratables,” he said. “But we were determined. What I learned is that there are landfills all around here – even though they are closed – they are leaching this poisonous ooze into the ground water and into this river. There are plenty of toxic waste sites throughout this area that have been abandoned or dangerous. But understanding this, we wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to keep this place as open space that was worthwhile in and of itself. There was a debate [over whether these] are good wetlands, bad wetlands, high-quality or low-quality, and I avoided that whole debate. It’s open space – that’s enough, let alone being just off the water. I do believe there are valuable wetlands and marshlands, redeemable.”
Rothman and the members of the environmental community began to lobby each governor as he or she was in office, and approached other organizations such as the Port Authority, which he believed might lend their support to his cause. Eventually, after distributing what he called a green map, [then-Acting] Gov. Donald DeFrancesco came over to the preservation side.
“He agreed the Mills project didn’t belong here,” Rothman said. “The Mills project continued anyway. They reduced its scale to about 90 acres and were going to full bore. I then got appointed to the House Appropriations Committee.”
This committee oversees the funding of nearly every federal agency and thus can guide what the government does by giving funding for particular uses. Among the agencies funded is the Army Corps of Engineers – a key player in deciding the fate of the Meadowlands.
“We established a special relationship, even more special than before,” Rothman said. “I also brought the Mills people down [to Washington D.C.] and said, why don’t you build on the [Continental Airlines] Arena site. This was before the [sports] teams were talking about leaving. There is an infrastructure and plenty of land next to the arena, and we can make land swaps if we are a few acres short. They told us we were nuts and said they were going to move ahead. Two or three years later, they accepted the deal to move to the arena site.”
More than just the Empire Tract
But Rothman said the goal was not merely to save the 600 acres where Mills had planned to build a mall, but to gather up all of the 8,400 acres which assorted environmentalists claimed constituted the remaining Meadowlands wilderness.
“At the time, the governing body was called the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission,” Rothman said. “Gradually over time – standing on the shoulders of people like Bill Sheehan and the Baykeeper Andy Willner and others – we convinced people that these lands are not forever unredeemable. I got Congress to authorize a three-year study for $5.6 million by the Army Corps and Fish and Wildlife service to have both expertise and perspectives. Once, we got that approved by the Congress, and this raised people’s expectations. This wasn’t just a bunch of individuals, whether elected officials or loony riverkeepers, saying we wanted to preserve this. We had the Congress of the United States on record saying that it was in the national interest to study this and determine how to best to purchase the land and remediate it, and turn it into an environmental park preserve.
“Once this happened, there was a fundamental change in many ways in the way people saw this area. They saw this almost as off limits. That the pipe dreams of so many people for so many years – even the congressman’s pipe dreams – might actually be more than pipe dreams since the Congress just got involved with millions of dollars for the study and millions of dollars for land acquisition. Shortly after that, the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission changed its name to the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission, omitting the word development from its title and from its mission.”
Rothman said his is all for the economic redevelopment of the region that would provide for the livelihood of the people who live here, but other places existed where people would build.
“We brought here last year the head of the fish and wildlife service, Dr. Steve Williams from the Bush administration,” Rothman said. “He was a good ol’ boy and obviously a very smart person, dedicated to what he was doing. And he said, we could not find this ecosystem anywhere in the country unless you travel an hour and a half outside the urban core. Yet here, he was in the middle of this and he could see the Empire State Building. This is something incredible. This is something worth preserving.”