How Does the Availability of Open Space in Hillsborough Compare with Other Towns in Somerset County

On Tuesday November 5th, voters have an opportunity to let the Township Committee know that Hillsborough should continue to buy open space while it is still available by VOTING NO on the Open Space Ballot question.

If this question passes, the Township Committee can divert up to 20% of our Open Space money at a time when the state no longer has funds to buy open space. Somerset County already allocates 25% of the County Open Space tax revenue for projects identified by their own needs analysis. The pot of money to buy open space is diminishing and voting no to the ballot question means that we, the residents of Hillsborough, choose to keep buying while there still is land to purchase

Other NJ towns are not so fortunate to have available Open Space land to buy; they are already so close to 100% build out that there is nothing left to buy using Open Space funds. The percentage built-out in a town is the amount of developed land as a percentage of “developable” land, where developable is the total land area minus permanently preserved (farmland preservation) or environmentally‑constrained land such as wetlands.

Five towns in Somerset County are already more than 90% built out: Bound Brook, Manville, North Plainfield, Somerville, and South Bound Brook. A December 2010 New Jersey Future report entitled “Built Out But Still Growing” noted that, “New Jersey is the most developed state in the nation and is on course to be the first of the 50 states to reach full build-out, at which point most new development is necessarily going to be redevelopment. …Yet despite the movement toward more compact development and greater reuse of already-developed lands, the development of open lands has not subsided. Between 2002 and 2007, an annual average of more than 16,000 acres of open space in New Jersey was converted to urbanized uses; this is actually a 7 percent increase over the rate between 1995 and 2002.”