Here’s the dirt on NJ’s latest legislative folly

Steve Landfield’s column appears twice a month in NJ Jewish News.

Here’s one you won’t believe. New Jersey now has an official state dirt. That’s right — we have official state dirt.

You can call it “soil” if it makes you feel any better, but let’s face it, whatever you call it, it’s the same stuff: It’s dirt.

If it makes you feel any better, we will be the 21st state to designate an official “soil.” Of course, how many of those other states have a multibillion-dollar budget deficit, the highest property taxes in the country, school funding issues, a busted Transportation Trust Fund, rampant political corruption, and the like?

So how did this happen? Well, contrary to popular conceptions, there are places in the state where concrete is not the official ground covering of New Jersey.

In fact, they say that after tourism and pharmaceuticals, farming is the third largest industry in the “Garden” State. So a couple of legislators, including one from Salem County and another from a place where he should know better, sponsored the legislation making Downer Soil our official form of dirt.

Downer Soil is the most prevalent soil in our state, covering nearly 300,000 acres in 11 counties. It is described by experts in this sort of thing as a surface layer featuring dark, grayish brown loamy sand. It covers much of south Jersey. It drains well and absorbs a lot of rain.

According to the sponsors, having an official state soil will help promote agriculture “in a place which calls itself the Garden State, but is also the most densely populated in the country.”

Or perhaps, like me, you prefer the comments of State Sen. Peter Inverso, quoted in newspaper accounts on the story as saying, “There’s a certain state pride associated with the state animal, state flower, but I’m not certain about dirt.”

It seems the state Assembly was more certain about this than Inverso, as it voted 75-0 in favor of our new state dirt.

That makes it part of a distinguished state symbol list including the state folk dance, the state bug, and even the state dinosaur. We actually have 14 “official” state symbols. Wondering about the three I just mentioned? Okay, before you wrack your brain or run to the official state Web site for the answers, they are the square dance, the honey bee, and the hadrosaurus, respectively.

We might have had a state vegetable by now as well, if not for the bumbling of the Legislature last year. They planned to designate the tomato the official state vegetable, until the measure failed after they were informed that a tomato is actually classified as a fruit. It could be worse, I suppose. They could have tried to designate the skunk cabbage the state’s official swamp plant.

Lest you think we have a monopoly on foolishness, perhaps we need to designate an official state mythical creature, like Wyoming, which is attempting to install the jackalope as its official choice. In case you’ve never seen one, I am pleased to say I actually have — they have a stuffed version of the mythical very large rabbit with antlers at my local Longhorn Steakhouse in Mount Olive. Theirs is a bit nearsighted — it wears eyeglasses.

Perhaps our choice should be the Jersey Devil?

Then there is the move by North Carolina to make the Venus flytrap its official state carnivorous plant. South Dakota has official state bread, although unlike us it refused to designate an official state dinosaur. Alabama has an official state whiskey. By now, I’m sure you get the point.

This would all be amusing if it didn’t waste valuable legislative time and money. Bills don’t just write themselves. In addition to the work and the time of legislators themselves, there is staff involvement as well as time and expense by the Office of Legislative Services, which researches, drafts, reviews, and copies the bills. The good news, if there is any, is that they calculate the bill at costing only about $2,500 to bring to fruition. A real bargain considering the billions we are already in the hole.

Now if we could just use the official state dirt to fill our official state budget hole — that would make it all worthwhile.

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