FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 1/11/2026  Liberty State Park again On the Chopping Block

The Friends of Liberty State Park www.folsp.org

WHEN: Thursday January 15 at 10am
WHERE: State House Commission Virtual Public Hearing www.nj.gov/treasury/statehouse-commission/pdf/01152026agenda.pdf

There’s no need to download Microsoft Teams App. People can speak for 3 minutes. There’s also a telephone call option and people at work can briefly join to put their comment in the Chat Box.

Five days before Mikie Sherrill is Governor, the undemocratic, shameless lame duck DEP Commissioner is pushing for a State House Commission approval of his 60-year new marina lease allowing a massive 500 boat storage warehouse - 70 feet high on 2.3 acres and a second building .3 acre at 55 feet high - a total of 2.6 acres of gargantuan commercial buildings along LSP’s northern entrance. That’s equivalent to 2 football fields with most of it 70 feet high!

Friends of LSP urge LSP and good government supporters to oppose the lease. The commercial warehouse would damage LSP’s sacredness, character, history, openness, purpose and sacredness of this priceless park behind Lady Liberty. The DEP lease is an obscene sell-out of LSP in allowing the multibillion-dollar marina corporation's major privatization expansion in the priceless NJ and American park, months before LSP's 50th birthday and USA's 250th! Like a bad king, the Commissioner is arrogantly ignoring the 49 years of overwhelming opposition to LSP privatization and commercialization and 702 public comment emails at the end of the summer.

There is NO GOOD REASON for Governor Murphy to not withdraw the LSP agenda item for what will be condemned as the “Governor Phil Murphy Boat Storage Warehouse”.  Governor Sherrill should review and revise the lease and listen to the People as Commissioner LaTourette hasn't done!

There are other options to fund the marina bulkhead if it actually is the state's obligation, which an attorney asserts it’s not. The DEP already is moving forward with the plan for informal athletic fields, lease or not. An attorney wrote letter states the DEP's lease process was defective. www.folsp.org/preservation/lspmarina_attorney_letter.pdf

Please also contact lease opponents Senator Raj Mukherji, Congressman Rob Menendez and Jersey City Mayor-elect James Solomon.

SIx boat warehouse renderings by Suntex Marinas are at https://www.folsp.org/preservation/marina_boatwarehouse_renderings.pdf

The lease ignores the maximum Half-Acre footprint for a dry rack storage facility set by the 1990 National Park Service Decision on this federally funded parkland, meant for “public outdoor recreation”.

The Friends' Jersey City Times opposition op-ed on Jan. 6 is at www.nj.gov/treasury/statehouse-commission/pdf/01152026agenda.pdf

Background material on this marina lease battle including the lease's "term sheet", revealed a month after it was secretly signed, is www.folsp.org/preservation/lspmarina_leasebattle.html