The Empire Tract - the Jewel in the Meadowlands Crown - Saved!

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The latest edition of Baykeeper's newsletter, The Estuarion, is dedicated to the victory in the Meadowlands, to download a PDF version click here.



March 25,2005 - Today the Meadowlands Conservation Trust, the state agency chartered to acquire, hold and manage conservation properties within New Jersey’s Hackensack River watershed- took full public ownership of the 587-acre Empire Tract. A spectacular wetland has now been preserved for the benefit of wildlife and the permanent enjoyment of the public. Until very recently, the Virginia-based Mills Corporation proposed what would have been the biggest mall east of the Mississippi River for the site. Now the Tract lies at the heart of an 8,400-acre urban wildlife preserve within sight of the Empire State Building.

“This is the victory we’ve been working toward for fifteen years,” says Baykeeper Andy Willner. “The Empire Tract is the last piece of the puzzle, the jewel in the crown, that concludes a journey that started for me in 1990. It is a journey that began with absolutely no one believing that the Meadowlands could be saved, or that it was worth saving, and ended with virtually everyone believing that it could and should be saved.”

Mills yielded in its original plan thanks to one of the most successful urban wetlands preservation campaigns in U.S. history. Relentless grassroots pressure was applied by a massive and diverse coalition which came to include thousands of concerned citizens, dozens of environmental and community groups, fourteen municipalities, U.S Congressmen, two New Jersey governors, state federal regulatory agencies, and two conservation coalitions that ultimately engaged hundreds of thousands of people: the Hackensack Meadowlands Preservation Alliance and the Meadowlands Partnership.

“We’re at the beginning of a new era here in the Meadowlands - an era that will prove once and for all that a strong economy and a healthy environment can - and must - be the hallmarks of truly successful people,” said Hackensack Riverkeeper Captain Bill Sheehan. “I’m honored to have played a role in helping bring us to this point and I look forward to working with the Trust for years to come.”

Willner and Sheehan were also among the first activists to oppose the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission’s Special Area Management Plan (SAMP) which would have filled and developed as much as 1200 acres of wetlands, destroying some of the last vital marsh habitat in the NY/NJ metro area.

William Cahill, Baykeeper’s attorney, who consequently joined the Rutgers Law School Environmental Law Clinic and partnering with Ed Lloyd, represented Baykeeper and other members of the Partnership said in response to the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission’s (HMDC) assertions of the time, “The Commission told us that the ecological integrity of the Meadowlands was bad and getting worse. We told them it was good and getting better. We’ve been proven correct,” says Cahill.

Baykeeper looks on the preservation of the Empire Tract as both the end, and beginning, of an era. It is the ideal moment, says Willner, to fully turn over the reins of Meadowlands advocacy to Hackensack Riverkeeper and Captain Sheehan. In 1992, it was Willner who recruited then-Secaucus taxi dispatcher Sheehan to the Meadowlands cause as a member of the Baykeeper Boating Auxiliary. In 1997, Willner sponsored Sheehan’s application to create Hackensack Riverkeeper, Inc. - now recognized as the leading environmental organization working on Hackensack River issues. Since then, Capt. Sheehan has been a staunch defender of the marsh.

“They told us that they had to fill wetlands in order to save wetlands. But we drew a line in the marsh and declared that not a single acre of wetlands would be bargained away. We told them that we could save all the wetlands and have economic prosperity too. Again, we’ve proven right.”

“The job in the Meadowlands is not done and Baykeeper will continue to work on conservation and advocacy issues, but the major responsibilities in the Meadowlands will fall on Captain Bill’s shoulders,” said Willner. “He has a huge job ahead of him: leading the Meadowlands Conservation Trust; working out issues involving Xanadu and the EnCap brownfields redevelopment project; and overseeing the ultimate preservation of all 8,400 acres of wetlands and waterways within the Meadowlands.”

“Baykeeper did absolutely everything we said we would do 15 years ago,” agrees Baykeeper Conservation Director Greg Remaud. “We defeated the SAMP that would have destroyed critical habitat while benefiting the privileged few, well-placed developers who had the Commission’s ear. We also defeated Mills in its bid to build Meadowlands Mills atop the Empire Tract.”

It was also Baykeeper who masterminded a permanent mechanism for land protection in the Meadowlands as long ago as 1993. “Our idea then for a Hackensack River Land Conservancy became the blueprint for what in 2000 became the Meadowlands Conservation Trust, the body that took ownership of the Empire Tract today,” says Remaud.

“To win,” says Susan Kraham, Counsel to Baykeeper and Hackensack Riverkeeper, and an attorney at the Rutgers Environmental Law Clinic, “We had to make great friends, like Congressman Steve Rothman and Bob Ceberio, the current executive director of the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission. We created amazing alliances with groups like the Waterkeepers, New Jersey Audubon, NRDC and Environmental Defense, municipalities, and state and federal agencies - and we literally changed the culture of the region.”

The Meadowlands Partnership reversed an almost 400-year trend of filling and destroying urban wetlands along the Hackensack. “Over the past fifteen years we’ve changed the public’s mind about the Meadowlands,” Kraham says. “They’ve stopped seeing it as a ‘mosquito infested swamp’ or a ‘wasteland’, and started seeing it as an invaluable resource, a place where egrets and herons soar, a place to launch a canoe, fish, and find solitude just a couple miles of Manhattan. The day has even come where the Meadowland is now being seen with pride as a prime ecotourism destination.”

Despite today’s victory, NY/NJ Baykeeper and Hackensack Riverkeeper will not be idle. “Baykeeper will turn its gaze to achieving similar protection, preservation, and restoration campaigns along the Lower Passaic, on the Raritan River, the Arthur Kill, in Jamaica Bay, and around the Hudson-Raritan Estuary,” said Willner.

“We launched the Passaic River Patrol in partnership with Hackensack Riverkeeper and Rutgers Environmental Law Clinic last year and on the Arthur Kill we’re working to establish a state and federal partnership to begin protecting the last but key remnant wildlands there.”

According to Willner, the Raritan River has many of the same problems the Hackensack has but without the benefit of a regional commission to guide its development. “There we want to end a policy of dealing development-by-development, and polluter-by-polluter, in piecemeal fashion, and create a regional focus and a master plan, built on real consensus and dialogue,” he added.

“Andy’s right when he says we have a huge job ahead of us but we’ve grown accustomed to them,” said Captain Sheehan. “When we were fighting the battles to save the Meadowlands, our opponents would ask what our compromise position was and our answer was that America’s urban natural resources had already been ‘compromised’ almost to extinction.”

“Ultimately all of us - government, business, environmentalists and former opponents - sat down together and reached not compromise but consensus. In that way, all of us got up from the table a winner,” Sheehan and Willner said.