Environmental groups seek to ensure Highlands meet standards

Wednesday, June 11, 2008
BY JAN BARRY
STAFF WRITER

New Jersey’s major environmental groups are amplifying their voices as they seek to ensure the Highlands regional master plan — now being finalized — meets state mandates to protect the water-generating region.

They hope to use their powers of persuasion with the overseeing Highlands Council to revise sections of the draft before it votes in July. But they’re also calling media conferences, like one held Tuesday, to press their argument that the current draft is riddled with loopholes. Those loopholes, they contend, would allow development to continue to overuse and pollute North Jersey’s prime water supply streams and reservoirs.

But Highlands Council Chairman John Weingart feels such criticisms are off the mark.

“When we vote in July, I believe the plan we will be considering will address all the mandates of the Highlands Act,” Weingart said in a telephone interview Wednesday.

The plan is scheduled for a vote July 17. It then goes to 88 towns, from Bergen to Hunterdon counties, to be put into action.

The Highlands Council has been working since 2004 to create a regional plan that would guide where development should be prohibited and where it could be allowed without adding to long-standing water supply problems across the seven-county region.

The council is revising a draft that’s been buffeted at public hearings and in fiercely clashing comments by builders, farmers, local officials, state agencies and environmental groups.

Builders want the plan to mandate where development must take place to meet court mandates that communities encourage “affordable housing — more housing for people of modest means. Conservationists want the plan to mandate where development should not be allowed. Both groups often point to the same tracts of land on steep forested ridges and beside mountain streams.

“There have been significant weakenings of the master plan over the last couple of months,” Julia Somers, executive director of the NJ Highlands Coalition, said at Tuesday’s news conference.

“There is a water shortage [in the region] and we have to address that,” Somers said.

Instead, she said, the draft plan would allow development in areas where streams are already overdrawn. Many Highlands streams also are tainted with contamination from overflowing septics and sewage treatment plants, farm runoff and industrial waste.

The coalition of environmental groups is critical of the draft for also allowing developers to pave over parts of groundwater recharge areas, build cluster housing on farm fields, and allow counties to set weaker standards for water contamination by nitrates from septic systems.

“The policies in this plan don’t support protection of our water,” said Robin O’Hearn, executive director of Skylands CLEAN, an environmental advocacy group based in Ringwood. “The Highlands Council needs to reject this master plan unless these policies are removed.”

Eileen Swan, the Highlands Council’s executive director, said the plan is still a work in progress.

“There are issues where the council moved things forward, and [others where it] asked for some more information. There are some outstanding issues,” she said of council discussions.

For example, she said, the council does not intend to allow development in areas where there is already an overuse of water, unless the municipality takes action to conserve enough water or find another source.

“They have to show the council what the mitigation plan is,” Swan said.

E-mail: barry@northjersey.com
 
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