Could the golf courses at Sand Hills & Pacific Dunes be built in NJ,

[Bruce Katona]

Pat: As I'm sure Jerry has expalined to you , public safety (diverting water off of a public right-of-way so the road is safe for traffic) has a higherpriority than the resultant creation of any wetlands...Public safety is just more important than a possible impact to a single land owner.

As far as TD - to my knowledge, the quarry was a permitted use of the site, the golf course required relief, thus the jump thru the hoops....Permitted Uses in NJ Land Use Law are like the defendants - Inncocent until proven guilty...if a use is permitted, a third party must prove the project will cause a public safety concern for it to be denied.  If a project needs relief, the opposite occurs....the project must prove that it is not harmful to the neighbors, public safety and meets the spirit and intent of the local land use ordinance for the relief to be granted - guilty until proven innocent.

I'm sure over the years and  few adult beverages Jerry and you have waxed poetic on this very topic.

[Craig Sweet]

Pat or Bruce...

Every special interest has a lobbyist or two or three....if golf course developers feel so strongly that the current approval process is to stringent and restrictive what are they doing to bring about some changes?

[Bruce Katona]

The Builders Association in NJ has a huge lobby effort (funded by the homebuilders in NJ) and is somewhat successful in keeping the playing field level.  Course owners and operators have traditionally not been as active in lobbying, except in very special instances.

[Craig Sweet]

Bruce...

I find landuse....settlement patterns...how we feel about place...how we go about protecting our communities...fascinating.

I was campaigning with a US Senate candidate in Vermont and at a stop at a nursing home we met a 92 year old woman that lived most of her life in New Jersey...she was going off about how bucolic it was when she was a child...lots of open fields and cows and farms everywhere....she said "that's why they called it the Garden State"...and then it started to change....

I am sure the Sand Hills of Nebraska will be just fine for a long time to come...and though there is no perceived "problems" now, I wonder what they are doing to assure that it will not be a  future "mini" New Jersey.  I wonder how often they talk about the need for economic growth and what they have to do to maintain the qualities they like about the Sand Hills....the very qualities that attract the economic growth in the first place....and then I think about a place like New Jersey...how did that balance between the farms and cows and open fields and economic growth, get so far out of whack....and how did the citizens react.

[archie_struthers]

 

Twisted Dune wasn't a quarry when we started, it was flat as a pancake. But one of my favorite enviromental engineers , Gary Sawhill, called me up one day in 1998 and asked me if you could build a golf course by digging down. After a short pause, I told him sure but that the costs increase pretty dramatically when you start moving dirt around.

 Suffice it to say we bought the property , had a short, fairly furious fight with EHT regarding whether we were a mining or golf course project , but ultimately prevailed and got permits to build. I don't think it hurt our cause in that the State needed the fill , so we had some political cover. It was an unusual site , free of any wetlands , endangered species and had a CAFRA permit to build a fairly large  residential community, which the township didn't need or want. So , despite some roadblocks , there were lots of positives to embrace with our plan.  

From there we proceeded to build the golf course, which wasn't a quarry but came to resemble one during the early stages of construction.  I had seen some nice holes over the years that were built in old quarries   eg (Black Diamond) and the thought of digging down ratherr than mounding up gave hope  we could escape the chocolate drop motif of some of the courses in Florida .  Indigenous dunefields in the state are well protected by the DEP , as they only occur along the beach (to the best of my knowledge) , given that , anything close to the littoral zones  in NJ require tremendous costs to develop. Try rebuilding a dock and you'll find out how much.  Perhaps, God willing this will change at some point. As to your query Pat , I'm negatory on the reg's easing.