| New runway may cost Ocean County more When the wind blows hard out of the southeast this spring, pilots coming into the Ocean County Airpark can make their "crabbing" approach – pointing into the wind as long as they are able to, until they are low enough for touchdown. Ocean County Planning Director David McKeon says the county government has been acting in good faith with the Pinelands Commission, agreeing up front to certain conditions proposed by the staff instead of insisting on analysis and studies that would delay the crosswind runway beyond the five years already spent planning. "It's been a long, long process and the commission made the right decision to move it forward," McKeon said Friday, after a commission panel voted to leave the land fund question open and send the proposed agreement out to a public hearing. The search will have to be at some distance from the airpark – in Berkeley and neighboring Manchester, Lacey and Waretown – because the county has already bought a great deal of additional land surrounding the airpark property, Roth said. If the commission approves an agreement in May, the county can apply for a grant from the Federal Aviation Administration for 90 percent of the $7 million project. Environmental activists went further, calling it a misuse of the trust fund. "You can't use the money in order to satisfy a permit requirement for destroying natural resources," complained Emile DeVito, the New Jersey Conservation Foundation's science director. Commission staffer Stacey Roth says thinning the woods could in theory improve the habitat for northern pine snakes. As a pre-existing use, the airpark was allowed to keep operating after the 1979 Pinelands Protection Act and subsequent adoption of an extensive management plan for the region. To compensate for the clearing and forest disturbance, the county will have to pay to permanently preserve 485 acres, to be chosen with help from the Pinelands staff. The agreement would give Ocean County up to three years to buy the additional land, a window county officials say they need to locate the best candidate properties. But McKeon rejected that. That makes for some very unhappy Pinelands commissioners, who say the rare act of allowing major construction in the Pinelands preservation area demands that the county dedicate new funding for the land purchase, above and beyond what it now spends on general open space projects. The small airport operation is rooted in Ocean County's ambitious economic development plans in the 1960s, which for a time included a whole new city center in western Lacey and high-speed roadways across the pines. Besides the crosswind runway, the county would build nine T hangars, small garage-like structures for single aircraft, and taxiways for moving aircraft. Airport advocates talk about that incident as evidence of the need for a crosswind runway, and now Ocean County and the state Pinelands Commission are at the verge of an agreement to build it. McKeon said the county bought out neighboring landowners "because it was the right thing to do" rather than wait in hopes of using those transactions as future bargaining chips with the commission. Ocean County proposes to use money from its Natural Lands Trust fund – the open-space program funded by a dedicated county property tax – to buy some 485 acres in the Pinelands to compensate for paving the new runway and disturbing wildlife habitat. |
Sunday, 1 April 2012
New runway may cost Ocean County more
