Trout Season is in full swing, the weather is warming and fishing license sales are up. Today thousands of trout are being stocked into the Musconetcong River. Every Friday in the spring hundreds of anglers flock to the Musconetcong River at 5PM to fish in New Jersey’s only Wild and Scenic River. On Saturday morning hundreds more show up, looking to catch trout and spend time with friends and family enjoying fishing for trout in cold clean water. It’s a time honored tradition that some folks arrange work and vacation schedules around and have been doing so for generations. The Musky is one of our states jewels and worthy of all the accolades and protection we can afford it.

Unless you are the DEP chief, then it’s just another chip to be bargained away and sacrificed for a little political favoritism. Today in the midst of trout season, on a stocking day, Mark Muriello decided to turn off flows from Lake Hopatcong into the river. Politicians and the “people of influence” on Lake Hopatcong succeeded in getting the DEP to ignore the minimum flow agreement and drop flows out of the lake into the river, essentially say screw the river we need to keep the political players on the lake satisfied.

First DEP decided to ignore the Highlands protections and allow a monster development project that directly violated the intent of the Act. Now they decide to sacrifice water quality in one of the Highlands most important waterways to still complaints by politically influential property owners. Have they forgotten their role is to protect our natural resources, not to determine which ones to sell out for political gain?