They’re building on wetlands by the Commodore Barry Bridge. How?

I crossed the Commodore Barry Bridge from Pennsylvania into New Jersey recently and couldn't miss it. A massive construction site, right on what was clearly wetlands, just south of the bridge on the Jersey side. I wanted to know what it was, and honestly, how it got permitted to build there at all.

The area has a name: Raccoon Island

This stretch of land, roughly 615 acres along the Delaware River in Logan Township, Gloucester County, is known locally as Raccoon Island. It's bounded by Floodgate Road, Bridgeport Speedway, Gibbstown, and Route 44. Local reporting describes Raccoon Island as "a development challenge, partly due to small-scale road infrastructure but largely because of the presence of extensive wetlands limiting the amount of buildable land."

You weren't imagining it. The wetlands are real, and well-documented, right down to Logan Township's own Environmental Resource Inventory, which separately maps both wetlands and FEMA flood zones for this exact area.

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The Delaware River and surrounding wetlands near Raccoon Island, photographed in July 2026 | Google

Here's the local zoning path that got it approved

Logan Township designated Raccoon Island a formal redevelopment zone back in September 2021. That single decision set the zoning rules for everything that followed. By 2022, a developer had proposed a five-building, five-million-square-foot warehouse park for the site.

A portion of that plan, three warehouses on about 72 acres, got final approval from Logan's zoning board as what's called a "by-right" application, meaning it already complied with the zoning rules on the books. According to reporting on that meeting, no members of the public even spoke.

A commercial listing shows a 1,170,000-square-foot building, called Building 1, Raccoon Island, being marketed for lease at this site. Right now, though, what's actually visible from the bridge is exactly what you'd expect this early: cleared, flattened ground and foundation-level infrastructure work, not a finished structure.

But the local zoning vote isn't the whole story

Here's the part that actually explains how you can build on documented wetlands in the first place. Local zoning approval is separate from New Jersey's state-level environmental permitting, which the NJ Department of Environmental Protection controls directly.

Under state law, any project touching wetlands needs a determination of exactly where those wetlands sit, called a Letter of Interpretation, followed by an actual wetlands permit before construction can begin. Same goes for flood hazard areas. But NJDEP's own permitting system has multiple tiers, and that matters a lot here.

Some activities qualify for what's called a "permit-by-rule," which requires no prior written approval from the state at all, just self-certification that pre-set conditions are met. Others require a General Permit, which does require public notice and a 90-day review. And since January 2025, any project touching a FEMA-mapped floodway specifically needs either a "No-Rise Certification," a licensed engineer confirming the project won't raise flood elevations for anyone else nearby, or a formal map revision from FEMA itself, before the state will even approve it.

In other words, New Jersey's wetlands and flood rules genuinely are strict on paper. But depending on exactly how a project is structured, some of that review can happen with zero public visibility at all.

Why this one's worth knowing about

This isn't a story about a community fighting a warehouse and winning or losing. It's a story about how a decision made years before a single shovel breaks ground, at both the local and state level, can end up mattering more than anything that happens at a public hearing after the fact.

So just what New Jersey needs: another warehouse, likely to sit empty for a while like so many others already do around this state, now apparently rising on land questionable enough to flood on its own. Where does it end?

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 show host ­­Eric Johnson only.