August 30, 2016
Testimony of “billofrights” to the House Environment & Transportation Committee Hearing on Fracking.
Dear Chairman Barve and Committee Members:
Once again I find myself a citizen speaking up to defend the best of what’s left of a rural region from yet another cock-eyed, stilted, and yes, so far, rigged development scheme, this one called fracking, which has been wired legally and politically at the top, at the national level. Only a genuine “citizens united” can create a better field of dreams for our economic and ecological hopes. I am finding out, as I go door-to-door in Frostburg, petition in hand, to ask our City Council and Mayor to support a statewide ban, listening to my neighbors, that our citizens are nearly united against this environmental affront.
How could I not be carried back to memories, seared into me forever, of my environmental campaigns in New Jersey, from 1989-2001 when I was the Assistant, then Director of Conservation for NJ Audubon Society? I only half-jokingly suggested to our Director, Tom Gilmore, that we create an Audubon Flag, like the regimental flags from the Union Cause in our American Civil War, and have streamers attached representing each of the battles we fought, many lasting years, even decades…I jotted down a list for you, so bear with me a moment, because fighting fracking made me think of what all these campaigns had in common:
My opponents across those now distant, yet still vivid, legislative and legal playing fields were:
The Rockefeller Family and BASF Chemical Corporation who wanted 150 acres of state park land at the “R” Family’s International Trade Center, in far northwestern rural NJ, itself a special NJ legislative “carve out” of tax exemptions for the “family,” and were going to get it from the NJ black box of insider deals, the State House Commission.
Core States Bank in Philadelphia who wanted to build the River Walk project, over 1,000 homes in a beautiful high valley near the Delaware River, home to T & E bird species, while the old city of Phillipsburg longed for re-vitalization, just like Cumberland and Frostburg in western Maryland. The only problem was they couldn’t meet the criteria in NJ regulations that said you couldn’t build such a project in the middle of a rural haven without sewers, transportation and other crucial infrastructure…esp. given a city with all those attributes that was less than five miles away. I had to dig through four cartons of legal nonsense to discover that they never had obtained the “finding” necessary to build, and a NJ Superior Court judge agreed that was the case.
When I die, bury me somewhere on the 450 acres – the Alpha Grasslands – that I helped save, next to NJ’s historic river, the Delaware, the river of my boyhood, youth and environmental career, and some of the most beautiful remaining rural land in the state.
Merrill Lynch in Hopewell, NJ who wanted to turn the rural edge into urban office parks, and needed the depressed city of Trenton’s excess treatment capacity to build the longest and most expensive sewer line in NJ History, thus giving away its own badly needed development potential, bowing to the miracles of Wall Street and its own negative self-image as a ghetto stigmatized city, despite being the state Capital. This was, after all, the roaring ’90ies, and the game plan on behalf of ML couldn’t have proceeded without “genuine” bi-partisanship as we’ve come to know and love it: Republican powerhouse Senator Bill Schluter and Democratic Mayor of Trenton, Doug Palmer. At least Senator Schluter acknowledge directly to me and George Howard, the head of NJ hunter’s lobby, the NJ State Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs, that his family had a direct financial stake in the lands that ML would be developing.
Ocean Spray Cranberries: how could a company with a name like that do anything bad…what is purer than Ocean Spray, but they were hiring, so I was told, Terry McAuliffe and his then lobbying firm to weaken national wetland laws and soon came after NJ’s law, the toughest in the nation…which Audubon had championed…Ocean Spray gave money to everyone, giving as much as General Motors…way over their heads…we held a press conference with Common Cause to tell everyone they were buying influence…they had a powerful political accomplice in NJ - A.Garfield DeMarco - a large cranberry grower who dominated a whole region, a land baron, and head of the Republican Party in Burlington County…he turned out to be the biggest illegal wetland filler in modern state history…filling for cranberry bogs…and he split the environmental community in two over his insider actions with a Republican DEP Chief and Gov. Christine Todd Whitman as his allies. We went to court against them… speaking of rigging: the NJ DEP held the public hearing on DeMarco’s home turf in a building named for him, full of pictures paying him and his family all due homage: “Equal Justice Under Law” takes yet another hit…
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I was reminded what these struggles had in common with our own in Maryland, and in so many other places, like New York State, as I was reading this passage from Matt Taibbi’s book “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.” Taibbi declares that “the unmovable principle that underlies everything modern that Wall Street does” is this: “if a crime is complicated enough and sanctified by enough ‘reputable’ attorneys and accountants, then American law enforcement will inevitably be too slow or too weak to stop it.”
And isn’t that the case before us tonight? Has there ever been a more outrageous rigging of our national environmental laws, with all due respect to Ocean Spray, by the frackers, the gas companies, who, knowing full well that their drilling fluids are chock full of toxic chemicals, declare them outside the bounds of existing laws, and not toxic at all, and then, and what else can you call this but “rigging” by an industry which relies upon drilling rigs, they said the toxic stew was a “proprietary” recipe, in effect constructing a giant national gag order that they would place over anyone questioning them, and even over the sensory organs of medical providers…when citizens near the sites find their bodies bleeding, their eyes, throat and lungs irritated and much, much worse…they, the citizens, if they want relief from their suffering, must sign away their truths from all inquiring eyes, press included. How do we compile medical statistics under these gag orders designed to silence the victims forever?
Is this not one of the most outrageous affronts to our very first Amendment in the first Bill of Rights, the right to free speech…(hopefully someday to be accompanied by the very first Right in FDR’s Second Bill of Rights…the right to a job…but not fracking jobs, rather, environmental restoration jobs).
I shouldn’t have to state, but I will so that there can be no misunderstanding: that I don’t want to “do business” with anyone that operates in this fashion, and I don’t think the citizens of our rural Western Maryland want to either, and neither do the citizens across the Free State of Maryland, which by its very motto should revolt against gag rules of any kind, and that’s why we want a new law , a permanent ban, to put these arrogant “riggers” back under the control of the democratic process, of the citizens of this Free State.
Thank you.
BillofRights
Frostburg, MD
PS I have been a resident of Maryland since 2005, of Frostburg, since Aug. of 2014. The Fracking Chemical Disclosure bill, HB 394, died in committee according to the Sierra Club legislative summary from April 15, 2016.