Attended a Warren County Open Space Committee meeting tonight, as an observer. Essentially, the Committee reviews requests for money to be allocated from the County open space fund and then recommends to the County which requests to grant.
This year, the fund is somewhere "just over a million dollars." Let's say $1,100,000 and crunch some ridiculously rough numbers like I like to do, using the ridiculously out-of-date, year-2000 census data I have readily available at my fingertips.
If an acre of open space in Warren County costs $4,000, which it might, the $1,100,000 fund this year will buy 275 acres, or about 0.12% of the county's land mass. The battle for open space in New Jersey, if it hasn't already been won or lost, will be, within the next generation, or twenty years. At a dollar commitment proportionate to this year's, Warren County will in the end have preserved 2.40% of its land. The rest will have fallen to the sprawl of development. (All this of course does not account for land already preserved as open space and land already "developed.") The $1,100,000 fund this year accounts for 0.04% of Warren County residents' income.
If Warren County residents instead contributed 0.50% of their incomes to the fund, 29% of the county's land could be preserved. Assuming the municipalities of the county and the State of New Jersey contributed equally to preservation, 85% or so of Warren County could be preserved in the end, with development concentrated in towns covering the remaining 15% of the land.
Just a thought.
This is my bit of a blog. Rambling words about rambling days. No focus and nothing ambitious. I seem to write most about local color, nature, and animals, and there is an incomplete chunk about my road trips of 2011.
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