For four decades, the folks who value Liberty State Park have fought off repeated attempts to ram some commercial enterprise into its pristine public space, including a sports complex, a private marina, and even a Formula One racetrack.

Sometimes it’s a tacky world. Developers often look at this Jersey City jewel — radiant in the shadow of two sacred American symbols — and start to salivate: It’s nice, they concede, but some neon glitz or something more hoity-toity for the blue bloods could make it really special.

It hardly matters to them that 5 million visitors a year want this park and its magnificent vista preserved forever as the panoramic gateway to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. But the offers keep on coming, and the latest is a proposal to essentially amputate Caven Point, a marshy peninsula on the park’s southwest corner, and transform its 21 acres into three holes of a golf course.

The offer from Paul Fireman, the Reebok CEO, is appealing from one perspective: It doesn’t comes with neon or exhaust fumes. He only wants it for green space, so that he can reconfigure the adjacent Liberty National Golf Course, which he built into a world-class private club that requires $500,000 just to join.

In return, he is offering a basket of baubles that some billionaires, even those as charitable as Fireman, would probably consider fair, and you cannot blame him for trying.

But Fireman needs to be reminded of this immutable truth: This park is our state’s backyard, and our backyard is not for sale at any price — especially when these are 21 acres the public would never get back.

View from the Caven Point peninsula in Liberty State Park.

For the record, Fireman’s offer includes providing jitney service for the park, financing a renovation of the picnic grounds, public access to the spit of beach on the perimeter of Caven Point, an expansion of the PGA’s “First Tee” program for underserved urban kids, some general remediation, and unspecified revenue streams.

But given that Caven Point is a premier ecological asset — not only a sanctuary for herons and peregrine falcons, but as a resource for school kids and explorers of all ages — that offer is cringeworthy.

Sam Pesin, the formidable president of Friends of Liberty State Park, calls it “an obscene giveaway to the 1 percent.”

Indeed, destroying more wilderness for the benefit of a few golfers in Fireman’s club isn’t exactly a win-win.

The highlighted area is the Caven Point section of Liberty State Park.

Moreover, it’s time to permanently discourage developers from proposing anything that doesn’t meet a legitimate public benefit. So our lawmakers should follow a call from Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg (D-Bergen) to pass the Liberty State Park Protection Act during this lame duck session.

This shouldn’t be hard. The bill sailed through the Senate Environment and Energy Committee by a 5-0 vote two weeks ago, eight months after being green-flagged in the Assembly Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee without a single nay.

No doubt, there will be late attempts to remove the language in the bill that forbids anything but “small-scale” commercial activities. Weinberg promises to repel every argument, because “I wouldn’t allow millionaire golfers to do anything, except to keep their golf clubs out of our public lands,” she said.

As often noted here before, small-scale development in the park is reasonable. Nobody is against bike rentals and food carts.

But privatization has its limits, particularly on this hallowed ground where Morris Pesin took rotting piers and decaying rail yards and turned them into our state’s most popular park in 1976.

His son Sam has spent the last 43 years jousting with developers who sought to drop hotels and waterparks on it. He knows that preserving natural space for the masses is a civic duty, especially when there is so little of it. Now our lawmakers must support his cause. Pass the bill.

Billionaire wants to expand golf club into Liberty State Park wetlands. So a private millionaire golf course expansion into a public park is good? Not https://t.co/Cm468lXaWY — Loretta Weinberg (@SenatorLorettaW) December 2, 2019

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