Efforts to convert Delaware Gap into national park reigniting
NEWTON, N.J. – A longtime effort to change the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area into a national park is stepping out of the shadows again and has picked up its first endorsement by a public body.
The Warren County Board of Commissioners unanimously approved a resolution last week endorsing the idea of Congress re-designating the nearly 70,000 acres of the recreation area as a national park and preserve.
As a “national recreation area,” known by its National Park Service designation “DEWA,” it would remain under the jurisdiction of the park service, but move into the category of “National Park.”
The National Park Service includes 423 individual units with several in New Jersey, including the Paterson Great Falls, Edison’s Workshops and the Morristown National Historic Park which includes four Revolution-era sites. Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty are also on the list and listed as shared with New York.
The National Park Service includes two sections of the Delaware River and the Great Egg Harbor River.
Among the 65 units which bear the National Park designation, there are just nine east of the Mississippi River, with just one, Acadia in Maine, in the Northeast. The two nearest to the region are the Cuyahoga Valley in Ohio and Shenandoah in Virginia.
In West Virginia, the New River Gorge National River, created as a National Park Service unit in 1978, was redesignated the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve.
The Warren County resolution said designating the recreation area as a national park “is to place this jewel of our national heritage into the crown of the national park system where it has always belonged.”
The resolution also stated “upgrading the Delaware Water Gap would create greater awareness and prestige for our region. This could also mean more funding for maintenance, visitor amenities and other improvements as well as support the local economy.”
During the meeting, Commissioner James Kern III said he met recently with Rep. Josh Gottheimer, Knowlton Township Mayor Adele Starrs, Committeeman Kevin Duffy of Hardwick Township and former Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area Superintendent John Donahue.
Contacted Friday, park spokeswoman Kathleen Sandt said DEWA officials, by federal law, cannot make any statements regarding the park designation movement.
However, she did write that a “change in designation alone may not impact these factors, but if the change includes additional lands and facilities, or results in a demonstrated change in visitation, that would be taken into ac$144
count in future fiscal cycles.”
She said any the National Park Service unit’s base funding “is provided through regular appropriations and is determined by the number of visitors, mission-essential activities, number and historic designation of facilities, acreage, road and trail mileage, if applicable, and other factors.”
Sandt provided visitor numbers dating back to 1978 with a 2020 figure of 4.1 million, which would put the recreation area 10th on the list of most-visited units in the National Park System.
From 1998 to 2013, visitation was on either side of 5 million each year, but dropped to a low of 3.2 million in 2018.
Visitation jumped in 2020 and 2021 because of the pandemic as people flocked to outdoor activities, such as kayaking, hiking and picnicking.
Sandt said there are 55 million people within a five-hour or less drive of the park.
In 2020, the park released numbers that show the 4.1 million visitors spent million in local communities. That visitation and spending supported 1,970 jobs and contributed toward a total economic output of $212 million in communities within 60 miles of the recreation area.
The designation of the 70,000 acres as a “recreation area,” is an artifact of the Tocks Island Dam project. Designed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the dam across the Delaware River at the head of Tocks Island, would have created a lake that filled much of the valley northward to near the New Jersey-new York-pennsylvania area.
The government bought and/or forced out the residents of what would have been underwater and around the shores of the proposed lake.
However, the 1960s project also birthed the environmental movement as citizen activists fought the idea and eventually the federal government gave up the dam plans and gave the property to the National Park Service.
National parks, recreation areas, preserves, battlefields or historic parks must be approved by Congress.
Over the past couple of decades, there have been different efforts to make the Water Gap area into a national park. However, those efforts failed to gain much traction because, as a general rule, a designated “national park” prohibits hunting and fishing.
Any possible ban on hunting and fishing brought out most sportsmen and outdoor groups and tamped down support for a name change.
Many areas of Alaska and some areas in the western U.S. carry the designation as “preserve” which allows for hunting and fishing and last year, the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve was approved in West Virginia, marking the river itself as the national park and the lands beside the river as preserve.
Donahue, the public face of the Delaware Water Gap effort, spent 38 years in the NPS, the last 13 years as superintendent at DEWA.