‘A Joke’: NJOA Slams Vote On Park Reopening 

Trenton – Sportsmen coalition slams legislature, calls for “political courage”.

The New Jersey Outdoor Alliance on Tuesday released a statement calling on the legislature to show “political courage” in the ongoing fight to reopen the state parks and forests after the Governor’s order last week closing public spaces.

“Monday’s party-line vote by the Assembly was a joke, a bad one, that fails to understand the needs of the people in this state and instead.” said NJOA spokesman Cody McLaughlin, “It’s easy to kowtow to a Governor in a crisis, much harder to show the courage to buck him when he is wrong. Instead, our elected representatives have chosen to buck the people and the facts of this situation, and it is sad. Our system of Government was founded on the principle of checks and balances, and now is the time to both check and balance a Governor who is dead wrong on the park closure issue. As we said before and will continue to say – we have guidelines for social distancing, and we, in good faith, committed to those guidelines. Shame on him.”

The group, which represents the state’s 794,000 hunters, anglers and fishermen, called on the legislature to support AR-151 and urge the Governor to work cooperatively with law-abiding citizens and immediately reopen state and county parks and forests with the same set of commonsense social distancing and occupancy guidelines that have worked for New Jersey thus far so that sportsmen and other outdoor recreation enthusiasts can continue to practice healthful activities that are a boon to mental and physical health in a time when morale is critically important to our state.

About the New Jersey Outdoor Alliance: New Jersey Outdoor Alliance’s mission is “preservation through conservation.” NJOA serves as a grassroots coalition of outdoorsmen and outdoorswomen dedicated to the conservation of natural resources and environmental stewardship that champions the intrinsic value of fishing, hunting and trapping, among opinion leaders, policy makers, and the public at-large. To learn more about the organization, please visit: https://njoutdooralliance.org/.