New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the nation, and already home to some 8 million people. With an additional million residents projected over the next twenty years, the Garden State faces enormous challenges in preserving open space and farmland. New Jersey also has less time than other states to address these challenges, and it is widely expected to be the first state to achieve complete build-out sometime within the next several decades. Substantially less time is available, however, to preserve adequate natural areas, farmland, watershed lands, critical habitat, greenways, trails, stream corridors, and parklands for passive and active recreation before these opportunities are lost forever.

Bearfort Mountain, Wawayanda State Park, NJ © Dwight Hiscano

Dating back more than 40 years to the first Green Acres Bond Act of 1961, New Jersey has a long tradition of making public investments in land acquisition. We have created experienced and capable public institutions to administer these public funds through the Green Acres Program and the State Farmland Preservation Program. In addition, the Garden State is blessed with a strong and energetic private conservation community, consisting of national, statewide, regional and local non-profit groups, which has made a substantial contribution to protecting land for future generations.

In recent years, New Jersey voters have affirmed their willingness to support dedicated taxes to provide public funding to protect open space and farmland on numerous occasions. In 1998, by a 2-1 margin, statewide voters approved a 30-year constitutional dedication of $98 million per year to support bonding and cash purchases of land through 2008. That margin was equaled in 2003, when voters across New Jersey supported raising the bonding cap for the Garden State Preservation Trust from $1 billion to $1.15 billion. And, by November of 2003, local voters had approved new, dedicated local property taxes to protect open space in some 198 towns and in all 21 counties.

New Jersey has made impressive progress on preserving open space and farmland. By 1998, almost 1 million of the state’s 4.8 million acres was already under some type of permanent protection. The 1999 Garden State Preservation Trust Act established a statutory goal of preserving an additional one million acres of open space, and more than 310,000 acres towards this goal had been protected by November, 2003.

Delaware Water Gap, Warren Cty, NJ © Dwight Hiscano

Both Green Acres and Farmland Preservation funds available to local governments and non-profits require matching funds. In the current financial climate, however, private funding available to provide these matching funds has declined substantially. In particular, private dollars available to non-profit groups to fund land acquisition projects from foundations, corporations and individuals have declined sharply, and prospects for the foreseeable future indicate that this trend will likely continue, if not worsen. Much like public conservation agencies, private conservation groups are currently experiencing a significant decline in overall operating revenues at the very time that they so desperately need to build their capacity to acquire and manage more acres in the near future.