“Until a governor gets up and says, ‘We’re not letting anything commercial in this park,’ that cathedral of open space and the American experience are going to be under attack,” said Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club, a conservation group.
New Governor
Governor Phil Murphy, a first-term Democrat who took office in January, said he wouldn’t rule out private development at the park.
"We look at these projects one at a time,” Murphy, 60, told reporters on Aug. 14. “When you’re as small as we are, and as dense as we are, the environment really matters.”
One recent proposal pitted the administration of Murphy, a retired Goldman Sachs Group Inc. senior director and U.S. ambassador to Germany, against Liberty National Golf Club owners Dan Fireman and his father, Paul Fireman, the former Reebok chairman and chief executive.
The club, on private land on the park’s outskirts, opened on Independence Day in 2006 atop 160 remediated toxic acres. A host of the PGA’s Presidents Cup and FedEx Cup matches, its 18th hole is just 1,000 yards from the Statue of Liberty, according to a Golf Digest course profile. Members can arrive for tee time aboard a private launch from Lower Manhattan.
Wildlife Home
When the club applied last year, at the suggestion of then-Governor Chris Christie’s administration, to expand into the park’s Caven Point wildlife area, 1,100 people emailed the Friends of Liberty State Park, a volunteer advocacy group headed by Sam Pesin.
“Should a billionaire’s golf course, which is used by multimillionaires, destroy a natural area?” Pesin said. “People knew it was wrong.”
Paul Fireman didn’t respond to voicemail messages left with his assistant at the Boston office of Fireman Capital Partners, where he is chief executive officer.