The Record (of Bergen County)
Freeing Liberty State Park
Development Corp. violates park's spirit
Wednesday, May 08, 2002


NEWS THAT the McGreevey administration wants to abolish the Liberty State Park Development Corp. prompts an instant reaction: What took Trenton so long to pull the plug on so horrible an agency?

As Bradley Campbell, the head of the state Department of Environmental Protection, wrote to the LSPDC last month: "It has become clear that the direction of the corporation does not coincide with the mission of Liberty State Park."

The park, located on the Hudson River waterfront in Jersey City and featuring wonderful views of the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and Lower Manhattan, is New Jersey's most popular state park. 

It is home to the Liberty Science Center as well as the historic Central Railroad terminal, where thousands upon thousands of immigrants began their journey westward a century ago. 

Rather than find ways to generate money that would be compatible with efforts to turn this 600-acre chunk of prime real estate into a premier urban park, the non-profit LSPDC has been an expensive little fiefdom that has too often tried to cultivate development that would be antithetical to a people's park - from a 150-acre golf course in the heart of the park to a commercial water park. 

Almost every plan that the LSPDC has floated has met with fierce opposition from the public, which has stated time and again that it does not want intrusive development for the park. (In fact, the grass-roots opposition is holding a rally in the park this Saturday at 11 a.m. in support of abolishing the corporation.)

Clearly, time is running out on the LSPDC. Mr. Campbell has given the corporation 60 days to show why its contract shouldn't be terminated.

Peter Ylvisaker, the president of the LSPDC, would not comment on the state's intentions to scrap his agency, except to say that he views the dispute as an internal matter and that he has already responded to the state. Such an approach is hardly surprising. The politically connected development corporation has always preferred to work mostly behind closed doors. 

Perhaps the last straw came when a rare DEP audit showed that the state had to pay out more than $800,000 in the past two years because the development corporation was under-collecting rental fees for parking.

That's outrageous: The state is actually losing money on parking lots built on state parkland in partto accommodate cars that use the privately operated ferries to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.

The governor and Mr. Campbell should stick to their guns and put an end to the development corporation, which has given new meaning to the term "non-profit."

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