The New Jersey Committee of Safety
324 Atsion Road
Shamong, New Jersey 08088
voice (609) 654-8326e-mail contact: gellett9371@earthlink.net
Senator Donald DiFrancesco
1816 Front St.
Scotch Plains, NJ 07076April 6,1998
Dear Senator DiFrancesco,
According to the White House Council on Environmental Quality, you don’t count!
Let us explain. As you may recall, President Clinton is soliciting nominations for the American Heritage Rivers Initiative program. Unknown persons, none of them elected, have nominated the Delaware, Passaic, Rahway and Raritan rivers in New Jersey.
But the Council on Environmental Quality says it will disregard whatever you or any other elected state, county or municipal official has to say about ‘opting out" of this federal scheme. The Council has arrogantly decided that it will accept only written communications from a congressman or congresswomen who oppose the designation of a river within his or her district.
Therefore, you don’t count!
But why would anyone oppose the American Heritage Rivers program? Some reasons are in the enclosures. Here are a few more:
· Federal top-down land use controls over not just river towns, but (eventually) entire river counties and watersheds that feed the river
· Devaluation of private property as more regulations are added
· Breakdown of traditional political boundaries
· Transfer of power from locally elected representatives to federally appointed bureaucrats
When the states created the federal government, they granted it only certain enumerated powers The power to lure the states and counties like flies into a federal web is not one of them. In that light, we have enclosed a resolution in opposition to the river scheme. Perhaps you will consider the resolution favorably.
Very truly yours,
/s/
For the New Jersey Committee of Safety,
Ida Anderson
324 Atsion Rd.
Shamong, NJ 08088
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
--Justice Louis Brandeis, Olmstead v U S, 277 U 5. 438 (1928)
