Smart growth needs better state planning

A New Jersey state appeals court has upheld the state planning commission's designation of five development-friendly centers in rural Sussex County but made clear they serve only as flexible guidelines that do not trump other environmental regulations. Yet the promise that the court decision sends a strong signal that designation as a town center may not be used as a surrogate for environmental considerations in permitting decisions will be as hollow as the judges in the Mount Laurel decision decreeing that the environment need not be sacrificed to create affordable housing.

This decision is relevant to the Warren/Hunterdon area due to the effort that Holland Township is making to get center designation from the state and the effort that Washington Township is making to have its designated center taken off the list.

Perhaps the Office of Smart Growth -- now headed by Eileen Swan -- is up to this highly complex and technical area of creating growth centers in these highly sensitive environmental areas, but the state planning commission that makes the designations is an agent of inappropriate growth cloaked with the legitimacy of a process. Unless that crowd is thrown out, smart growth will remain little more than a fashionable but meaningless catch phrase in New Jersey.

Smart growth is directing economic energy to our forever-struggling older cities. Let's face it. So much of what will be growing in these new centers has little to do with the state plan's policy goal of encouraging tourism and promoting the recreational use of such lands. What has to do with encouraging tourism and promoting the recreational use of such lands doesn't need a center. What does need a center can be used to pump energy into existing centers in Sussex County.

Smart growth is growing/-reusing/revitalizing on already used land. That shouldn't be too hard to do in New Jersey. And the cost savings from not making the required new infrastructure could be reward enough for a cash-strapped state.

A center does not belong in the sensitive lands of Washington Township or Holland Township, but our current state planning system often wrongly designates such areas for growth.

Mike King

Chairman, Phillipsburg Riverview Organization, Phillipsburg