Gov. Christie Whitman talks about open space, development and the Mercer Oak

Residing in the picturesque town of Oldwick about 20 miles north of Princeton in the New Jersey hill country, Gov. Christie Whitman has had plenty of time to think about the importance of woodlands, farms, marshlands and other open land space to herself and the state's approximately eight million residents.

In an interview with The Daily Princetonian on Friday, Whitman explained why she has made open space preservation a cornerstone of her six-year administration.

"The urgency [to preserve open space] has come from six-and-a-half years of driving around this state as governor and watching cornfields and forests turn into supermarkets and housing developments," Whitman said, "and seeing how quickly that happened, and watching one farm after another become the target of a developer and then become developed."

Initiative

"It's been happening at such a quick rate that you have a level of frustration," she said. "You've got to move fast, you've got to move now, or we're going to miss the opportunity. Once the land's gone we can't get it back."

Whitman gave a lecture Thursday in Dodds Auditorium titled "Sewers: The Last Frontier of Smart Growth." During the interview, she explained why she chose that topic.

"I do believe that sewers really are the last frontier of growth because they determine the ability of people to put in new developments," she said. "You have to have septics and sewer systems to be able to develop, and it's a little like the baseball diamond in the Iowa cornfield was to the players in 'Field of Dreams' — you build it and they will come. If you extend sewer systems, then you have development."

With more than 1,000 people per square mile, New Jersey is America's most densely populated state. Through the establishment of the Garden State Preservation Trust, Whitman has provided $1 billion for the state's counties and municipalities to preserve one million acres of farmland, greenways and open space.

Princeton is one of New Jersey's few green oases within the state's most highly developed corridor — the region between Philadelphia and New York.

Whitman commented about whether the University — which owns more than 2,000 acres of land at the West Windsor fields and Forrestal campus — should be subject to the goals of her open space platform.

"Let me make something very clear — this is not 'no growth,' " she said. "We want growth, we need growth."

"In addition to preserving the million acres, there will be another million acres left that will be under-developed or undeveloped," said Whitman, who is an ex-officio member of the University Board of Trustees.

She did not mention specifically whether she felt the University should preserve the West Windsor fields as undeveloped space. Her administration's intention is, she said, "to be smart about which of those acres we actually end up developing, because we need to do it in an environmentally sensitive way."

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"But it doesn't mean that there will be no growth," she added. "We just want to be smart about how we do it."

Whitman said the Mercer Oak — which stood in the middle of Princeton Battlefield for more than 250 years before it collapsed in March — would be an inspiration for achieving the one million-acre goal.

"It was a wonderful sight in the middle of that field, and I'm sorry it's gone, but age catches up with all of us, eventually," she said with a chuckle.

She said her administration will erect "signs around the state that are oak trees. And we'll be filling them up with green as we get closer and closer to our million-acre goal so that people can see what's happening and understand that we really are preserving open space in the way that we said we would."

Whitman — who graduated from Wheaton College in 1968 — offered a few words of advice for Princeton's aspiring politicians who will have to tackle open space and development issues with an even greater sense of urgency as the country's population rapidly expands.

"The needs and the requirements are different in every state, and I would never tell anyone to take what's happened here and try to recreate it wholesale anywhere else," she explained.

"But I would certainly encourage young people, particularly activists, to look at what we've done — a combination of having restrictions and incentives," she said, invoking a familiar policy theme used by fellow Republican and presidential hopeful Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

"Nobody has to reinvent the wheel all the time," she said. "We need to be smart and learn from one another, but that also doesn't mean that any one state has all the right answers for any other."