We bought our house in 1990 on the south side of town. The south side of town, although in NJ, is very rural with working farms and wholesale nurseries on our three mile long road. One of our next door neighbors is almost half a mile away and there’s a soy bean field across the street. Proposed Route 92 was to be built a couple miles south of our property.
Until 1992, Route 92 was to be a free, multi-access, roadway constructed by the State DOT several miles south of us. The proposed road’s length and utility had been drastically shortened and pushed northward since 1928, when it was originally called “New Jersey’s Gateway to the Shore”. It is important to note that Route 92 would now no longer be a free highway – it would be a toll road, elevated 15 feet, with approximately 7 overpasses and a 500’ bridge over a pristine lake in its 6.7 mile length. That bridge would not save the wetlands beneath, but would act to destroy them by altering the lake's environment with shadows, road salts, petroleum runoff and the construction process itself. The last of Southern Middlesex County’s farmlands would be destroyed and, ultimately, developed if this poorly planned project was allowed to move forward.
The primary reason for Route 92 was to drive traffic into a corporate park on the Plainsboro/Princeton border called Forrestal
Center – one exit ramp led directly into that developer’s parking lot! Was it surprising then, that Plainsboro and
the Princetons supported this alignment?
Certainly not. If Forrestal Center Forrestal Center Princeton
University Forrestal
Center
In early 1994 we received a certified mail letter notifying us that
there would be a NJ Turnpike hearing to formally notify the residents about the latest
alignment of Route 92. My husband, a local lawyer, had to
attend a business meeting on the evening of the Hearing, so I was nominated to
go to the hearing to get the Dowgin questions and opinions on the record. I dropped the kids off at my mother-in-law’s
house before the evening meeting and off I went to the Township Municipal
Building. I arrived a bit early, signed
in and sat down near the front of the room.
The Turnpike’s consultants gave a brief overview of the road project,
unveiled a huge map of the road alignment and opened up the Hearing for comments. The man who was called to speak just before I
was represented a polling organization.
He spouted all kinds of statistics such as "50% of those polled think we
need more east-west roads". I turned to
the men sitting on either side of me and asked each of them if they’d been
called by the pollsters. Neither had. I was called next. As I got to the podium, I was briefly stunned
by how full the room had gotten.
Standing room only in a room set up for 300. After regaining my composure, I stated my
name and address for the record (court reporters capturing all comments was standard
procedure, I came to find out over the years). I was still really annoyed at the
statistics-spewing speaker, so my next comment on the record was to ask “how
many people in this room received a phone call from the pollster – please raise
your hands”. No hands. I said “me either…quite a poll….no one
directly affected by the proposed road was called”. The room erupted in applause and a woman who
was sitting in the row behind my seat jumped up so fast, she knocked her chair
over. The speakers continued to be
called to the podium for an hour when there was an “intermission”.
I introduced myself to the woman who had knocked her chair over. Mary.
Mary would be my right arm in this highway fight for the next 12
years. We walked to the huge map that
spanned the entire front of the meeting room.
We picked out our houses on the map, saw how close the road would come
to my property and were outraged. I
said, pretty much rhetorically, “how am I supposed to live in my house with
this road right out front?”. There was a
young man in a suit and tie standing on my left who looked down his nose at me
and said “if you don’t like it, find a realtor”. I was appalled! Who the heck was he to say that to me? It would be a few more years of seeing him at
every hearing before I knew that he worked for a Turnpike subcontractor. By the end of the 12 year fight, he would
acknowledge my presence with a nod and a smile but we never spoke again. And every time I was too tired to continue
with this road fight, all I had to do was think of him and his nasty comment at
that first Hearing and I’d feel rejuvenated.
After leaving that hearing, my husband and I discussed the
ramifications of living across the street from a four-lane toll road. I was dead set against it. Mike wanted to build a berm across our front
yard to wall us in. We would fight the
project.
When do you feel like a real grown up? For me, it wasn’t when I
had children…that was somewhat like babysitting (sort of). For me it was
when my then 8 year old daughter came to me and asked “where will the deer and
animals live if there’s a road there?” and “you won’t let them do this,
right?”. Ok, the quick lesson here was that not everything in life is as we
wish it would be. My actual answer was
something like, I’ll do my best and if we go down, we’ll go down swinging. My next thought was that my mom would know
what to do and I actually reached for the phone before realizing that my
parents lived in Maryland and why on earth would she be able, or want, to help
from 200 miles away? I felt like I was
on my own.….I was a grown up.
Our township was not, at first, on our side and Rt 92 was going to be
built through a very rural area with few residents. Those of us who lived
in this rural area didn’t know each other and met for the first time at that
initial public hearing, so the first thing we did was to have a “neighborhood”
meeting by putting notices in the 30 mailboxes along our road. Five people showed up, but we eventually
found a good base of approximately a dozen people willing to work on this.
We had to first show our own Township Council members that we had a big
voter base who didn't want the road built, which we did by going door to door
to get over 1000 signatures on petitions (a huge number for our area). Note
to self: cute children wearing tee
shirts emblazoned with “NO92” work great to get people to open doors and
listen!
Once we had our township support, we moved on to our County
Freeholders. The County allowed the NO92 discussion to be placed on their
docket on a mid-summer evening. The
power of many people was necessary and we showed up that night with several dozen
folks to sit in the gallery and ten or so ready to speak on the record. There was other Freeholder business on the
calendar that evening and we were last on the agenda. At 8PM, the Freeholders took a 30 minute
break for dinner. We waited. At 11PM the air conditioning switched off (on
purpose?) but we still waited. Finally,
the Freeholders understood that we weren’t going to leave and we were allowed
to begin. Each of us stood at the
podium, stated our names for the record (there had been reporters there, but
they had deadlines and had left the building….I almost typed “arena”…) and
began to get our opinions out there.
When it was my turn, I got to the podium and began to say my piece when
a small, older lady in a short skirt and funky hat jumped up and walked over to
the Freeholder chairman and started to chat with him (although “flirt” would
have been more descriptive). He, of
course, was very flattered and began to flirt back with her. I stopped speaking and just stood there in
silence. He finally looked up and in a
nasty tone told me to continue. I, who
can be equally nasty (go figure…) said that I would wait until they were done
flirting with each other. The other
Freeholders tried to hide their giggles but those in the audience didn’t. The lady went back to her seat and when it
was quiet again, I continued. At the end
of the night, which was 2AM, we left. We
never did get the support of the County, which also included Plainsboro
Township, but ultimately (several years later) they at least agreed to remain silent
on the issue.
The “NO92” Coalition was a small group of dedicated and persistent
residents. Mary and I had fun one night
over a bottle of chardonnay making up names of “groups” that could be part of
our coalition. Southern South Brunswick
Residents, Southern Middlesex County Residents, Farmers Against Highways…you
get the picture. The groups consisted of
the same dozen active residents and our local Council. But to the press, and to our opposition, we
were huge!
Public hearings are a good way to show that you have support. I purchased “NO92” buttons with my personal funds so that we could hand them out to people we asked to attend. Of course, it’s best to have a lot of people get up to speak, but bodies in chairs are important and buttons identify their position. We also asked some of our residents to park their tractors in the hearing location parking lots with “NO92” signs on them….”Don’t pave over my farm” kind of things. Tractors with children on them proved to be great photos for the local newspapers and we made the front pages many times. So did a sign on our front lawn that read “TOLL BOOTHS STINK”.
Other photo ops worked even if they sounded silly. In that first year, we held a candle light
vigil on my front lawn. We invited the
press (well, “leaked” to the press would be more descriptive) and had about 50
people there (including our Council people) with candles at dusk. Front page the next day. We made a video tape of the area (the age of
iPhones was still many years away), with the help of some tech savvy high
school students and a neighbor who worked for a local cable tv company. It showed the environmentally sensitive lake
that would be filled in and paved over, alongside photos of toll booths on the
NJ Turnpike (remember that Rt 92 was going to be a toll road). It was the lead story on local NJ news the
next day. I appeared on local cable news
programs and debated the head of the Turnpike.
A local radio program had me debate some local business owners who
claimed that this road would have helped them.
The hosts of the radio program later called to tell me that they’d been
in the studio (on mute at the time) high-fiving each other as I “kicked butt”.
We held press conferences every chance we got and we learned to work
with the press. We picketed our
then-Governor when she came to speak at one of our local grade schools on a
frigid and windy February. A reporter
asked me how many people I thought were there.
I looked at the dozen or so and said, with a straight face, “I’m not
sure….20 or 30”. His story read that
40-50 people were demonstrating. Once
again, we appeared to be bigger than we really were. Also in that edition of the paper was a story
about the new technology in the school.
My niece was photographed with the Governor and her picture was placed
next to mine in the paper – a nice juxtaposition. I called my niece later that evening to
apologize for stealing her thunder and for any embarrassment I might have
caused her. My oldest niece, then in 6th
grade, answered the phone and asked me if “that was you outside, Aunt
Cathy?”. The students had heard rumor of
a “demonstration” outside of their school building that day. I said yes and waited for her to get upset (I
had my apology at the ready). Her
response was ….”AWESOME”!!
We were factual and pointed out our opponents errors in a calm rational
way to the press. We had two very good
articles in the NY Times because our opponents “inadvertently” left out some
important facts. Those articles depicted
the pro-92’ers as scum and our side as “Joan of Arc” (or “David and Goliath”…take
your pick). A woman from Massachusetts
actually called me after one of the NY Times articles to interview me for a
book she was writing (I’m not sure she ever got it published).
I did some research online (the internet was a relatively new research
tool in 1994) and got some advice from a group who had just won their road battle
in Virginia. They told me that no matter
how many bridges and overpasses are built, the “footprint” of the road was the
important thing. A bridge would change
the wetlands underneath it with shadowing (changes the light and temperature)
and runoff, not to mention the damage done by the construction itself.
I learned that a short skirt can help get information from a DEP scientist
during a meeting in Trenton. Apparently
the scientists at the DEP, I was told, all thought this road was a terrible
idea but their research was selectively used to make the opposite appear true. He told me that if the number of wetland
acres to be filled was greater than 5 (it was 18+ acres before a road re-design)
that the Federal EPA could be requested to review the project. This one piece of information was instrumental
in our eventual “win” many years later. We
started a letter writing campaign to insist on Federal oversight. The Feds (the Army Corps of Engineers, as
well as the EPA) came out squarely on our side, as did our own State Department
of Fish, Game & Wildlife.
Unions, however, are in favor of any road project (it creates jobs) and
it’s no surprise that all were in favor of Rt 92. The unions would pay some of their members to
go to the public hearings to look tough and intimidate others. These union “goons” never got up to speak,
watched the clock and left early. We waited
them out, although not before there were “incidents”. One of my neighbors (an Italian-from-Brooklyn
transplant) got into a chair throwing altercation (to this day, I’m not really
sure who started that one). I was
pushed, elbowed and spat upon (no, I couldn’t let that one go….I turned to that
“gentleman” and told him that his mother would be very proud of him…).
At a hearing at the Turnpike building (the hearing where a Union goon
spat upon me), I got up to state some of the facts of the issue. The Turnpike’s executive board turned to the
Chief Engineer to ask if I was correct when I’d stated that Rt 92 would
increase, not decrease, traffic on Rt 1 Southbound. “Yes” was the answer. Without so much as a discussion, the board
voted to approve the road. WHAT? No discussion. I flipped and walked out to the hallway,
where the reporters had been waiting.
After speaking to several of them, a burly guy shouted down the hall “HEY…WHO’S
DOWGIN?”. I’d learned by then that it’s
best to meet attitude with attitude, so I shouted back “WHO WANTS TO KNOW?”. He came over to me, shook my hand, smiled and
said that he’d known my uncle (actually a great-uncle-in-law - a long deceased
State Trooper). He also said that as the
head of the NJ Motor Truck Association, he had to support the road (his members
were all promised “discount cards” for gas and services along the length of the
Turnpike) but that personally he agreed with me and I was doing a great job.
At a NJ Turnpike hearing to “accept public comment” prior to applying
for final permits, I was approached by Ed Gross, the Executive Director of the
NJ Turnpike. He wanted to “speak to me
in private”. I asked him straight out if
I “needed a body guard”. I was only half
joking and told my friend, Mary, that if I wasn’t back in 15 minutes to get a
cop and come look for me. Ed (we were on
a first name basis by this time) and I went for a walk outside the
building. He told me that I was a “formidable
opponent” and he offered to buy my house at fair market value so that I could
leave the area and not have to see the road.
Taken by surprise, I said the first thing that popped into my mind
(naturally) and told him “but I like where I live”. He told me to talk to my husband, but no one
else, about it and call him in a few days.
I went home and told Mike what had happened. Right away, he said, that’s a bribe to shut
you up. I was shocked. A BRIBE??
Bribes are offered to people who really have something to give. I realized that evening that I was having an
effect on this project. Why that didn’t
dawn on me before, I’m not sure. A day
or two later, I got a call from Ed at work asking me to stand by my fax machine
(remember, this was still before email).
He faxed over a document, on Turnpike letterhead, offering to purchase
EVERY house on Friendship Road (37 homes) in exchange for my shutting up and
going away. I told Ed that I couldn’t
make that decision for all of the homeowners and that I didn’t represent
them. He asked me to not show the
document to anyone until the Turnpike got their permits to build (which they
never did). I still have that document
locked up in a safe.
In 2006, while at work, my cell phone lit up with many calls coming in
at one time. I answered one and it was
from a reporter at the Newark Star Ledger wanting me to comment on the record
about a Turnpike decision. Had I heard
about “the decision”? No….I was quietly
working away trying to make a living (because I hadn’t sold my house for a
million dollars to the Turnpike……..).
Our then acting Governor Cody had emptied the Rt 92 “piggy bank” and
moved the funds to another account (to widen the NJ Turnpike from Exit 8A to
Exit 6 – a project currently underway now in 2012). I sat back on my chair. After 12 years, the Rt 92 battle was
over. And we’d actually won. We beat the big unions, big business,
Princeton University and Plainsboro Township.
It was an amazingly fun 12 year battle, in retrospect. If you open your mouth, with your brain
attached, you can be powerful!
Epilogue:
The land along Friendship Road had belonged to several land developers
who had, for years, held up their project while waiting for a Rt 92
decision. Once the road project was, for
all intents and purposes, dead, the developer wanted to move ahead with their
plans – to build over a million square feet of warehouses. They started to appear before our Township
Council to get their project moving. I
didn’t work for 12 years just to have warehousing across the street (with
trucks coming in and out all day and night!).
Back to the Township we went.
This time, there was an active adult community in the vicinity and they
were not pleased about the warehouse plan.
They took the lead and invited me to their planning meetings. Ultimately, the Township revoked the
developer’s zoning to disallow warehousing.
The developer sued the Township.
An out of court settlement was reached and the developer now will build
a small retail center (think strip mall) near Rt 130, 195 Townhouses next to
that and finally, 23 large, single family homes across the street from me. The rest of the land (including land next
door to me) that had belonged to the NJ Turnpike is now the wetland mitigation
area for the Turnpike widening project.
Nothing can ever be built on it.
