Environment New Jersey, the new home of NJPIRG’s environmental program, supports the Department’s new flood control rules. The strong program created by the new components of the Flood Hazard Control Act are a step forward in the protection of stream corridors in New Jersey and will help to fulfill our state’s commitment to the preservation of our natural resources.
As the floods of this summer clearly demonstrated, the welfare of New Jersey’s environment, communities, and property are inexorably intertwined. The guidelines we use to determine how our communities will grow in the coming years will also determine how our lives and welfare will be impacted the next time the waters rise. By proposing rules that look at these factors holistically, the Department will help move New Jersey towards more sustainable growth patterns near our waterways.
I would particularly like to highlight the proposed rules’ requirements to protect the vegetated areas along waterways so critical for both flood control and the health and vitality of New Jersey’s waterways. By increasing riparian corridor buffer zones, the rules ensure that the natural filters our waterways possess to mitigate the destruction of flooding will remain intact. Maintaining riparian corridors, of course, is among the most important steps our state can take to ensure the health of our waterways, drinking water, and wildlife habitat.
While currently most waterways possess only 25-foot corridors and frequently even Category One waterways – among the state’s highest quality rivers and streams – often have buffers reduced to 150 feet in length, the proposed rule ups the protections across the board. Category One waterways will now receive 300-foot buffers, trout maintenance streams and their tributaries as well as areas with habitat for Threatened and Endangered species will receive 150-foot buffers, and all other streams will receive 50-foot buffers.
One important omission from the proposed rules is mandatory buffers of 150 to 300 feet for all waterways above reservoirs and water supply intakes. Development in this state should not come at the expense of the health of our drinking water, and this rule has failed to cement this principle into regulation.
Another important component of the proposed rules is the no net fill requirement. While the current rules allow permit holders to replace displaced water storage capacity far away from the actual disturbance, these rules properly require the storage capacity to be replaced within the same flood hazard area and watershed.
Among the other positive steps taken by the proposed rules are the closure of the agricultural exemption loophole in the Storm Water Rules, the extension to the non-tidal areas of the CAFRA zone, and the measures to encourage redevelopment within already built-up areas rather than new construction in environmentally sensitive places.
Though they do fail to install larger buffers around waterways that provide drinking water, fail to protect headwater areas of streams that drain less than 50 acres, and open loopholes to allow development within 25 feet of streams for things like oil tanks and utility crossings through proposed permits by rule, the proposed flood control rules are overall a strong and effective regulatory effort to ensure the health of both waterways and communities in this state.
Now it is important for the Department to turn its attention to several other serious matters for water quality in the state.
The Department should increase the designation of Category One waterways across the board, especially for Southern New Jersey waterways and some critical waterways in north and central New Jersey outside the Highlands Planning and Preservation area. Category One designation is one of the state’s most significant tools to protect critical habitat, drinking water sources, and recreational treasures. Southern New Jersey has historically received fewer designations than has Northern New Jersey, despite thousands of miles of critically important rivers in streams. Across the state, though, the Department should increase its designation to all deserving waterways.
Just as important, Environment New Jersey urges the Department to take bold steps to improve water quality in the state by limiting discharge from sewer and septic systems as it updates and modernizes the state’s Water Quality Management Planning rules. Nutrient loading from sewer and septic systems is a leading cause of waterway impairment, robbing our waterways of the oxygen upon which marine life depends and putting public health at risk. At least half the state’s waterway impairments can be directly attributed to sewer and septic discharge, with fully 314 of the 2,151 waterways assessed suffering from marine life failure and 154 from excessive phosphorus. The state has many policy solutions in its toolbox to limit pollution from sewer and septic systems, including the authority to cap nutrient loading by sewer plants into impaired waterways, limiting sewer expansion into environmentally sensitive areas, requiring environmental reviews for all significant sewer plant expansions, setting stricter limits on nitrate discharges into groundwater from septic systems, and enforcing that standard through scientifically based density limits for new development.
As the Department works to address these and other critical matters pertaining to water quality and natural resources in the state, it should employ the same ambitious, forward looking vision that is embodied by the proposed changes to the Flood Hazard Control Act. Again, we support the proposed rules and thank the Department and Administration for introducing this change in response to the flooding experienced by New Jersey this summer.
