State Issues Revised Development Map

McGreevey quickly responded that the whole process was a work in progress, and yesterday his administration blinked, issuing a revised map--still an environmental plat--that adds some 300,000 acres to the green column. Developers are calling it a step in the right direction, but environmentalists aren't pleased.

Most of that newly green acreage is in South Jersey's Burlington County, sections of central Ocean and Monmouth counties, and stretches of Somerset and Hunterdon counties along I-78. The latter is a concession to what critics charged was one of the biggest mistakes of the map issued in January--that portions of the I-78 corridor west of Bridgewater, located in a development zone under the existing state plan, had suddenly been given the red light. That was particularly upsetting to developers who had made land purchases in the region for future development.

Altogether, the so-called green zones on the latest map amount of just over one million acres, which is about one-fifth of the Garden State's total land area. Asked at yesterday's unveiling of the revised map where all of the extra green acreage had come from since January, state DEP commissioner Brad Campbell answered, "as is the case with any process that relies on data, the data is never perfect."

Environmentalists, on the other hand, were quick to charge that the state caved in to pressure from the development community, promising to be vocal during the period of public comment.

The next step in the ongoing process, Campbell explained, will be public comment leading to a third version of the map sometime this spring. It will be overlaid with the existing state growth management map, and will be published "with the regulatory changes needed to give it the force of law," according to Campbell.