I was involved with Michael and Don in the effort to regain access several years ago. They reached out to us in Morris to seek our input given the success we'd had with Morris County parks. We shared all our lessons learned, and even had a few of the Morris Trails Partnership hiking establishment help us present the case for multi-use to Essex County.
Mike, Don and the crew there gave it a yeoman's effort. They got themselves onto the South Mtn Conservancy, they got the IMBA TCC to show up and educate the powers that be, and to build a sustainable section of trail that is still going strong (which is more than what you can say about the legacy trails in the park, which have a fair amount of erosion due to poor, fall-line construction (do they still have those ridiculous official signs blaming the erosion on bikes, or did they finally take those down?), and they also established regular trail maintenance days (that I believe are still being held).
Alas, after all their hard work, it boiled down to politics. DeVincenzo (Essex County Exec) didn't want to deal with it, citing the Deer Management issue as his top priority. This, despite a vast amount of public support for multi-use trails. This, from a person reported a few years later to be drawing a pension and salary for the same job..
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/04/states_largest_police_union_ca.html
But, I digress...
That was probably about 5 years ago, and it can't hurt to at least feel the issue out again. I commend you for wanting to give it a go, and Griffo you are spot on about the local business support, this was raised as well during the discussions (and in our case, we cited Morristown as a shining example...you often see a lot of cars with bikes on them parked in Morristown on the weekend, their owners likely partaking of the local establishments before or after a ride at Lew Mo or Patriot's Path). But definitely talk with Mike and Don. If there's an honest chance that it'll succeed this time around, I'm sure you can count on support from local riders and riders in neighboring counties (me for one).