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The New Jersey Off-Highway Vehicle Association (NJOHVA) is a New Jersey not-for-profit coalition that advocates safety, environmental, conservation and land ethics education, serves as a communication network, and works to protect, promote, and enhance responsible and quality off-highway vehicle recreation opportunity.
Over the last 20 years New Jersey has been on a buying spree, purchasing land in the name of open space preservation. Most of the land purchased with Green Acre funding, that both you and I pay for through our property and income taxes
Most of the land purchased with Green Acre funding ends up in the Fish and Wildlife portfolio, which has nearly quadrupled in land size over the last 20 years. At the same time New Jersey’s hunting population has dropped off by as much as 50 percent over that same 20 year period. Fish and Wildlife has increased it’s staff without increasing fees and again you and I pay for it through our property taxes.
A possible solution to the decrease in hunting and fishing registration numbers, would be to allow hunters access to the New Jersey's Fish and Wildlife areas with their ATV’s. In other parts or the country the idea of accessing State Fish and wildlife lands has proven to be extremely popular and greatly increased the numbers of hunters permits and generated additional revenue for the state.
If you live in New Jersey I'm sure you're aware that we live in one of the few states in the country that doesn’t offer an OHV program of any type. In other words OHV recreational opportunities don’t exist unless you own a street legal motor vehicle.
Throughout most of the United States there are trail networks with trail heads on State Forest as well as Fish and Wildlife lands. It's been proven throughout the country that when OHV recreation is managed and maintained in a sound ecological manner it protects the environment from adverse and unregulated damage.
New Jersey on the other hand believes that the best way to manage OHV use is by regulations, enforcements and exclusion. In other words they want to make anyone that operates an OHV in the state a criminal.
On top of that New Jersey DEP had promised that two locations for OHV parks on state owned land would be up and running by the end of 2005, but both locations are on hold because some want the OHV registration fees to go to more enforcement and regulations before they sign off on the promissed OHV parks.
The goal at NJOHVA is to open public land to OHV recreation. If you’re a hunter or sportsmen we want to work with you to help change the public perception of OHV use for hunting. If you are an OHV recreationlist, our goal is to educate and promote responsible OHV recreation on both public and private Land.
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