The Monmouth County Park System and the Board of Recreation Commissioners are once again disregarding public opinion on the deer hunt in our county parks. Most Monmouth County residents oppose allowing hunting in our county parks.

Some parks will be closed to everyone except hunters, and park rangers will stand at the park entrances and turn away the 99 percent of New Jersey residents who don't hunt.

In other parks, hunters will be allowed to hunt right next to the playgrounds and picnic areas where our children play. But the park system and the board don't care what the public thinks.

At a meeting April 21, the park system presented its deer management plan for 2008-09. The deadline for public comments was the same day - April 21.

However, the board voted to approve the hunt without reading the written public comments that were delivered at that meeting!

This was a new low for the board and the park system. In the past, there were multiple public meetings on the hunt, and the public was notified in advance of when the board would be voting.

This year, a process which usually takes place over several weeks was condensed down to a single evening, with no advance public notice that the vote would take place at the same meeting where the plan was introduced. Even one of the commissioners, N. Britt Raynor, expressed concerns over the abbreviated comment period.

The board claims that it is not statutorily required to hold a public comment period on the deer management plan. Even if that is so, the public comment period was a farce, to give the illusion that the deer management plan was adopted according to a fair public process. A county body should not be engaged in such unethical practices.

Furthermore, hunting is a failed experiment and does not reduce human/deer conflicts. We have had deer hunting for centuries and some people still complain about deer. Can anyone say that we now have fewer human/deer conflicts as a result of this hunt?

The hunt should be stopped because it is cruel to the animals, dangerous to people and solves nothing.

The lack of information is unacceptable, yet typifies the park system's and the board's disregard of public opinion, lack of transparency and lack of ethics regarding this hunt.

Doris Lin Freehold Township