Jazz concert will help fight privatizing of fort
Judith Stanley Coleman
Guest Column

The first director of our National Park Service once wrote that our "national parks must be maintained in absolutely unimpaired form." But last year an Interior Department political appointee tried to rewrite the NPS management policy - de-emphasizing what he criticized as the NPS's "anti-enjoyment" policy and promoting instead more dirt bikes, jet skies, helicopter tours and rock concerts.

Fortunately, an outraged public shouted him down. The NPS backed away from its tentative, pro-commercial tilt recently reasserting the "fundamental purpose of the National Park system begins with a mandate to conserve park resources and values."

This sounds encouraging, but actions still count for more. The very month the NPS reasserted its commitment to "park resources and values," it granted its seventh extension to the proposed developer of Fort Hancock, who wants to lease 36 old Army buildings for 60 years for bars, offices and restaurants, including what every National Park needs - a training school for stockbrokers! How these commercial activities square with national park "values" escapes me.

As a result, our grassroots organization - Save Sandy Hook - is holding a fundraiser at my Middletown home on Sept. 10 to continue opposing this privatization and commercialization plan. Calling it "Jazz on the Navesink," we're featuring the haunting and lyrical sounds of jazz trumpeter Leif Arntzen and his trio, as well as cocktails and hors d'oeuvres with the lovely Navesink River as a backdrop.

This special outdoor concert will give you an opportunity to help us oppose the NPS's false claim that we must allow businesses into the fort.

This isn't an isolated issue. Notwithstanding the pretty words, we believe Fort Hancock is a harbinger of what a still-politicized NPS wants in many parks - profit centers.

Our tax dollars are being used to push this "profits-come-first" plan that could turn our national parks into corporate parks. Using preservation as an excuse, the NPS' privatization plan already has reduced the public's access to Sandy Hook's beaches, which it refuses to discuss publicly. It also will adversely affect Sandy Hook's 300 species of wildlife, including endangered species, a problem the NPS refuses to study.

If John Muir and President Theodore Roosevelt didn't recognize the threat of developers to our natural resources almost 135 years ago, we'd have condos and high rises in Yellowstone and ringing the Grand Canyon today.

Yet given the haplessness of the NPS and the anti-conservation scheming of political ideologues, we may yet see those condos and high rises. After all, isn't Congress deliberately starving our national parks? And didn't the radical pro-development Congressman Ron Pombo try to sell off about one-quarter of our parklands? And isn't the federal government trying to sell or lease 800,000 acres of other federal lands to corporations?

Fort Hancock is just one move on a national chessboard to allow developers to sneak into our parks. So please call (732) 872-2405 or go to savesandyhook.org for tickets to join us at 4 p.m. on Sept. 10 as we enjoy great jazz, and I say this sadly, conserve our park resources and values from an NPS that has been losing its way.

Judith Stanley Coleman is president of Save Sandy Hook