It’s Your Land Red Bank - Help Protect It

Red Bankers own a riverfront parcel of land.  It’s located adjacent to the library, next lot over to the west.  It’s somewhat nondescript.  Officially known as Block 8, Lots 4 and 4.01, it partially serves as parking for the library.  The remainder is prime waterfront real estate - a nice grassy transition to the river.     

Currently, the parcel is listed on the New Jersey Registered Open Space Inventory (ROSI) list.  As its full name indicates, inclusion on the ROSI list means this property owned by all of Red Bank will remain public well past the three-year terms of any particular Council member.  It guarantees, in perpetuity, that future Red Bankers will have river access along a crowded shoreline.  It’s a check on shortsightedness.  But currently, our Council and administration, without a naysayer in the group as far as I can tell, is working diligently to have the property removed from this fail-safe list.  Even more, they are spending taxpayer dollars to engage an engineer to delist the lot.   

At last Thursday’s Red Bank Council candidate debate, I asked the incumbents about this very issue.  Why is the Borough so set on removing that parcel of land from the ROSI list?  What is the end game?  

But in well crafted political speak, which is just a euphemism for a famous Oscar Mayer lunch meat, I was repeatedly told the parcel was put on the ROSI list “by mistake.”  Well you know what, I once made a mistake and put too much cheese on the lasagna.  It turned out delicious.  

If it was put there by mistake, so what?  While looking for a silicone based alternative to rubber, engineers invented silly putty by “mistake.”  With no practical industrial or military use, silly putty later turned up on toy shelves everywhere.  And I have fond memories of that stretchy toy.  Now I’m hoping we’re left with more than fond memories of a publically owned waterfront lot.    

This is more than an environmental issue.  Depending on the Council’s to this point mysterious endgame, it could be a fiscal responsibility issue. It’s certainly a public trust issue.  And for a Council that prides itself on transparency, which on this issue appears murkier than the bottom of the Navesink, it’s an issue of openness in government.   

Instead explaining the end game for removing a piece of property from the public open space list, in essence for removing a protection of the public trust, our current leadership insinuates we should simply honor a clerical error of a long-ago administration.

And that’s just sillier than silly putty.