Letters

The Lewis Road planned residential development is another stage in the struggle for the destiny of the critical Spinney Hills Aquifer. This project is presently being considered by the Pine Barrens Commission. As a Spinney Road resident, I have significant personal interest in this 10-year saga. Albeit, this perspective is iconoclastic, but there is an undeniable paradigm shift away from scientific reason and protective intent toward biased interpretation and a self-serving agenda.

Originally, the focus was the environment, but there is a gradual, insidious pivot to compliance. Arguably, this swing is the natural progression for project approval. However, there is an inherent oxymoron within this reasoning. The conundrum is the premise that the development of 130 residences, and an 18-hole golf course with support facilities and amenities, above the Spinney Hills Aquifer is environmentally safe.

The Lewis Road PRD is counterintuitive to the primary intent of many of our environmental laws, statutes and codes that have been enacted to ensure our groundwater integrity. It is the mission of proponents to use interpretation of statutes, precedence and ordinances to seduce interested parties into confusing conformity with merit.

Citing selective scientific findings and conjuring favorable results are not fact. They are simply suppositions based on biased models and subjective hypotheses, which eventually have sublimated into “truth.” Legally binding votes by elected officials, appointed boards and committees have been denigrated by arbitrary interpretation of statutes, jurisdictional disputes and even semantics. Tactics of intimidation and litigation finesse opposition. Despite commendable efforts by proponents to “massage” the impact to conform to community concerns, the specter of avarice haunts their motives.

The virtues and perils of large-scale developing of Spinney Hills have been well documented and intricately discussed by congressional representatives, legislators, town boards, commissions, civic associations, environmental groups, publications, community meetings, and thousands of individual letters and digital comments.

Yet, in the millions of words about the Lewis Road PRD, not one of the officials, boards, groups, organizations or individuals (sans Andrea Spilka and residents) have ever championed the indigenous residents of 50 homes on Spinney Road. We will literally be encased by the “lobster claw” of this development. We alone will be imperiled by disruptions, intrusions and pollution during the six-year build-out and in perpetuity. Our homes will digress from views of bucolic isolation to vistas of a sewage treatment plant, a 9,000-square-foot maintenance building, and strangers traipsing through our backyards for lost golf balls.

Concerns for groundwater, erosion, aesthetics, trees, plants, insects, bats, birds, lighting, anthropogenic nitrogen, traffic, noise, schools, revenue, and even club members have all been addressed. Ironically, not one word of concern has ever been expressed for the people who reside on Spinney Road.

Ron Nappi

East Quogue