New Jersey LCV and Southern Burlington County NAACP Respond to New Jersey Senator Schepisi’s Disparaging Comments About Affordable Housing

TRENTON – New Jersey League of Conservation Voters Executive Director, Ed Potosnak, and SBC-NJ NAACP President & NJSC NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Chairman, Marcus Sibley, issued the following statement in response to State Senator Holly Schepisi’s recent misleading claims about affordable housing projects and hurricane-caused damage.

“It is deeply troubling that New Jersey Senator, Holly Schepisi, uses recent hurricane-caused flooding to advance her anti-affordable housing agenda and shirk responsibility for her failure to protect New Jersey’s environment. She received a dismal 44% on our most recent environmental scorecard. It is equally alarming that a sitting New Jersey Senator would try to undermine the meaningful progress our state has made in providing housing to people in need,” said Ed Potosnak, Executive Director, New Jersey LCV.  “Municipalities don’t have to build in any environmentally sensitive areas— but because some have failed to prioritize affordable housing, they’ve gobbled up all the land that could have been for affordable housing and now THEY want to push building in inappropriate areas.”

“At a time when information is literally at our fingertips, it’s incredibly saddening to hear a Senator blatantly weaponizing misinformation to further an agenda to further vilify our most vulnerable neighbors,” said Marcus Sibley, SBC-NJ NAACP President and NJSC NAACP Chairman for Environmental and Climate Justice. “I’m not sure what’s more disrespectful, the attempt to scapegoat lower-income New Jerseyans living in affordable housing units, or the audacity to believe that people won’t do a simple internet search to fact check the baseless claims. We respect our constituents, so we operate in facts. We wish that were the standard statewide.”

New Jersey League of Conservation Voters is a non-partisan organization whose mission is to elect environmental champions, hold public officials accountable, and support laws which protect our environment and improve the quality of people’s lives.

Southern Burlington County NAACP was chartered May 9, 1966 in Cinnaminson, NJ. Under President Roosevelt Nesmith’s leadership, the branch took the lead in the 1975 landmark civil rights case, Southern Burlington County N.A.A.C.P. v. Mount Laurel Township (commonly called Mount Laurel I). In this case, SBC-NJ NAACP challenged the zoning ordinance of Mount Laurel Township, on the grounds that it operated to exclude low and moderate income persons from obtaining housing in the municipality.