In 1975, the Delaware River Basin Commission, composed of four basin-state governors, voted to shelve the Tocks Island Dam project. The land already acquired by the federal government was handed over to the National Park Service for stewardship, and Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, originally intended as a narrrow swath of land around a reservoir, became a 70,000 acre park with 40 miles of free-flowing river.
Though it had promised drought abeyance, flood mitigation, power generation, and reservoir recreation, in the end the project was too costly in other ways. A long and often bitter battle was over.