Page 22 - RE-NJ

20 JANUARY 2025
DG: Yes, it’s specifi cally the fact that
misinformation is so pervasive. And,
speaking from personal experience,
we’ve watched this trend develop over
the last 15 years or so.
To be clear, development of any
sort always faces some opposition,
and that is normal and healthy. This
campaign is not at all seeking to
stop a dialogue between community
residents and developers. It’s meant
to clarify that dialogue and bring it
back to a point where we’re talking
about real problems and real facts
rather than a series of concerns that
may have really no basis in reality.
And throughout a long period of
time, we’ve seen that the amount of
conversations that we have during a
project application and the types of
conversations have shifted. Originally,
we talked about the specifi cs within
a project with concerned residents.
We talked about where truck traffi c
would go, for example, on public
streets. That’s a very common issue
to come up during applications and
a very healthy conversation for the
developer to have with the public,
but that has shifted to a large part of
those conversations being (about)
combating misinformation spread
about the project by some of these
opposition groups.
And the opposition groups, in some
cases, know exactly what they’re
doing, and this is a deliberate tactic
to slow down a project or to try and
stop a project. In some cases it’s
just the public peering into a very
complicated process and only getting a
small slice of that and misinterpreting
that slice as something that might
be malevolent, where they just don’t
have the context of the full project.
So those conversations tend to be
much more frustrating and much less
productive with residents because we
spend a lot of time trying to correct
misinformation that they came to
without us providing it to them, and
often that’s just not a productive
way to solve a problem within an
application. It’s much more productive
if the residents know what the
developer is doing and understand it,
and their opinions aren’t swayed by
‘fake news,’ for lack of a better word.
RENJ: That misinformation often
stems from the kinds of environmental
cleanups that you and other
developers are doing on some of these
blighted industrial sites, as you’ve
mentioned. Can you elaborate?
DG: As you’re well aware, industrial
development often occurs on
historically contaminated sites, so
it’s often that developers are not only
building a building on that site but
also performing relatively signifi cant
remediation activities either before
or during the construction. And
environmental science is complicated,
it’s very hard, it’s very sophisticated.
So the issue is that the public is getting
only bits and pieces of information
and they’re extrapolating a lot from
that information, and often those
extrapolations are done without
the proper training or context of an
environmental scientist, so it almost
always comes out to the wrong
conclusion.
RENJ: That’s ironic, considering that
many of these warehouse projects
wouldn’t happen without that
remediation or vice versa.
DG: We spend a lot of money during
our projects and a lot of time on
very sophisticated environmental
experts that will navigate one of the
most complicated and sophisticated
environmental regulatory regimes in
STRENGTH IN
NUMBERS
C irculate NJ’s member
organizations include NAIOP
New Jersey, Amazon, Crow
Holdings Development, Federal
Business Centers, Forsgate
Industrial Partners, Greek Real
Estate Partners, The Hampshire
the United States here in New Jersey.
And that is just a very information-
dense and process-driven piece of
real estate development here, so that
can be some of the more diffi cult
conversations to have with concerned
residents. Obviously, when residents
have concerns about environmental
cleanups, those are legitimate —
they’re concerned for their health and
safety, the health and safety of their
children — so people can get very
scared by some of the information
they see, without knowledge of who
the developer is or their reputation,
whether or not they’re looking out for
the community’s best interests. Often
that information creates a sense
of paranoia within the community
that is very hard for a developer to
overcome once that’s been unleashed,
so to speak.
That’s probably the most common
example of misinformation that
we’ve been dealing with over the
last several years, and one of the
major components of messaging in
this campaign is that there’s major
benefi ts to industrial development
… So we feel like, if we can get the
public to understand the benefi ts
that we’re bringing to the community
through private remediation of
contaminated sites, that hopefully
that will combat some
of the sense of paranoia
that we’re not doing it
correctly or we’re not
following certain rules
or protocols laid out
by the state. And I can
say, as a member of the
community, that a huge
portion of our budget, a
huge portion of the time
that we spend on each
of these sites is fi guring
that piece out.
RENJ: What other
messaging do you
expect to focus on?
Circulate NJ notes that companies and facilities in the transportation, logistics and distribution industry
support more than 400,000 jobs and employ 12 percent of the state’s private workforce.
Cos., J.G. Petrucci Co. Inc., NAI
James E. Hanson, Prologis Inc.,
Russo Development, Sitex Group,
Wilentz Goldman & Spitzer PA,
Shipping Association of New York
and New Jersey, Association of
Bi-State Motor Carriers, the New
Jersey Chamber of Commerce
and the New Jersey Business &
Industry Association.
DG: I would just highlight how large
the logistics industry is within the
state and how important it is to
our economy. One of the largest
employment sectors in the state
is logistics, and that includes
distribution, it includes home delivery.
Trucks are a massive employment
sector within the state, but they are
often demonized as hazards to the
community or thought of as not
good jobs to bring to a community.
The reality, though, is trucking and
logistics are … really important
to keeping a lot of people in good
employment, as well as for our state
government’s fi nancial health. So
just pointing out the fact that there’s
a large number of our residents that
work in the space and rely on this
industry to keep their families fed and
keep their lights on — and that these
are not bad jobs. These are, in some
cases, very, very good jobs.
Something we’ve talked about as a
coalition before is how one of the
bigger political issues of our time
is the decline of manufacturing
within the U.S. And if we look at
what’s happened to the workers
that traditionally were employed in
U.S. manufacturing, a lot of them, if
not the vast majority of them, have
transitioned into retail jobs, and the
stability and pay scale of a retail job
compared to the jobs that are created
in industrial facilities is night and day.
So in terms of options for workers
adapting to a new economy and
dealing with some of the fallout of
manufacturing falling off in the United
States, this is a very good outcome
for them to be able to work in one of
these facilities and have a similar job
security and a similar pay scale to
what they would have received in the
manufacturing facilities. As compared
to what has become the common
alternative, which is going into service
industry retail-oriented jobs that don’t
give the same amount of stability as
this sector often does. RE