1995 - Establishing Blue Acres Program Will Prove Prescient in Sandy’s Aftermath

Superstorm Sandy slammed into New Jersey on Oct. 29, 2012. By the time the skies cleared – 24 hours later – the merciless wind and water had inflicted $36.8 billion in losses on the Garden State.

The toll from Sandy, according to press reports, included 346,000 homes damaged.

A November 2013 FEMA report indicated that a massive storm surge reached more than 5 feet in Cape May and nearly 6 feet in Atlantic City. Coastal inundation levels were recorded at 4 to 9 feet in Monmouth and Middlesex counties, 3 to 7 feet in Union and Hudson counties, 3 to 5 feet in Ocean County, and 2 to 4 feet in Essex, Bergen, Atlantic, Burlington and Cape May counties.

For the owners of hundreds of Garden State homes in flood-prone areas, the road to recovery from Sandy’s devastation came in the form of the DEP’s Blue Acres program. Under Blue Acres, such homes have been purchased at pre-flood values and razed, and the land has been preserved as open space.

But that assistance would never have been available if New Jersey residents hadn’t been supportive of Green Acres program efforts for many, many years.

And now, a look at 1995 …

Twenty-five years ago, New Jerseyans overwhelmingly voted to approve a $340 million Green Acres bond, allowing the DEP to continue to preserve thousands of acres of farmland, historic sites and open space across the country’s most densely populated state.

Originally created in 1961, the Green Acres program had, by the mid-’90s, committed more than $1.1 billion to preserving New Jersey’s natural and cultural heritage – and it has consistently enjoyed the support of a wide swath of voters. In its decades-long history – through times of economic boom and bust – New Jerseyans have voted “yes” on every single Green Acres bond issue brought up for referendum.

And in 1995, for the first time, $30 million out of that $340 million was reserved for a new program called Blue Acres, which is dedicated to acquiring coastal properties prone to flooding or storm damage and converting them into open space. Initially focused on the Passaic River Basin and vulnerable areas along the Atlantic and Delaware Bay coasts, the Blue Acres program later would be expanded to include all state waters.

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