Beyond the Drought:
New Jersey Faces a Long-Range Water Supply Crisis

While the drought of 2002 is a short-term crisis caused by the driest six months on record, New Jersey will be facing a long-range water supply crisis in more than one-third of the state's water supply regions by 2010.

Demand for water is rising at the same time that the capacity of the state's watersheds to capture rainfall is diminishing and the replenishing snowfalls have disappeared.

Governor James E. McGreevey recently gave the DEP new powers to limit development in those regions. But the water crisis raises new questions about the ability of government to cope with complex environmental crises that require shifts in traditional thinking.

BY ROBERT HENNELLY

It was another rainy day in May, one that seemed to make a mockery of the state's dire drought warnings. In Jersey City, on the banks of the Hudson across the river from Ground Zero, Bradley Campbell, the commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Protection, tried his best to be sympathetic to the roomful of small business types whose livelihoods were taking a major hit courtesy of the state's strict restrictions on outdoor water use.

It was not easy for the mild-mannered Philadelphia lawyer, but the crowd at the public hearing in the restored train terminal in Liberty State Park gave him points for trying. They were burly outdoor types and Campbell was a "suit and tie" with the "big picture." The dozens of irrigation system installers, landscapers, and golf course superintendents were still choking on the DEP's description of their businesses as "non-essential water users."

The bizarre acceleration of seasons from a mild late winter to record-shattering summer highs by early spring caused greenery to explode while gulping rapidly from already stressed water sources. DEP officials insisted that no amount of spring showers could make up for years with little snow nor for the record-breaking heat wave in early spring.

But all the crowd seemed to consider was that it was raining and it had been raining for weeks and the spring foliage was green. Did Democrats just dislike golf? Were the water restrictions just a back-door way for the "enviros" to sharpen the voluntary "smart growth" State Plan into a 21st Century stake they could drive into the heart of home rule and local land-use control?

"My business is down 65 percent," one audience member bitterly complained. Commissioner Campbell was reminded that while golf is a game, it is also a billion-dollar business that employs 100,000 people in New Jersey alone.

"We have granted some golf course hardship exemptions," Campbell responded. To show that he was not just being arbitrary with the drought regulations, Campbell added, "It was my first instinct to say no to watering fairways at all. But I got information at a stakeholders' meeting about just how much it cost to reestablish a fairway and I relented."

But what the cranky crowd wanted to know was simply when the restrictions on water use would be lifted. They did not like what they heard.

"The reservoirs could be overflowing and we still are going to have drought restrictions," Campbell stated.

And that could be just the beginning.

NEW JERSEY NOT ALONE IN FACING LONG-RANGE WATER SUPPLY CRISIS

More than five years before the drought of 2002, a comprehensive examination of the status of the state's water supply concluded that up to nine of the state's 20 water resource planning regions were headed for a water deficit by 2010. The regions with the widest gap in water supply and demand are those experiencing the most explosive growth -- places like Ocean, Burlington, and Monmouth counties.

According to the 1996 DEP report Water in the 21st Century: The Vital Resource, half of the fresh water we use -- some 700 million gallons a day -- comes out of the watershed. Where does it go? Much of it goes out to sea; ironically, some of it washes back into coastal communities in the form of saltwater intrusion as strained subsurface aquifers are increasingly pumped to support continued development.

"We lose about 300 billion gallons of water a year in stormwater runoff," says the Sierra Club's Jeff Tittel. Keep in mind that New Jersey needs just a billion gallons a day.

As water supply gets tighter and tighter, the pressure mounts for what is called out-of-basin water transfers, the withdrawal from less hard-hit water sources to satisfy thirstier parts of the state. But over time, such an expedient approach undermines the ability of the water-exporting watershed to recharge itself and assimilate waste and runoff.

This is the third consecutive year of below-normal precipitation for the Garden State. Last autumn and winter were the driest six months since record-keeping began in 1895. The DEP reported that the number of wells going dry around the state was three times the number that had gone dry over the last five years. To get a full picture of the situation, consider that thousands of wells with existing flow have been closed over the years because of contamination.

The last time the region faced such a springtime precipitation shortfall, Lyndon Johnson was President. New Jersey is not alone. The entire East Coast, from Maine to Georgia, is parched as well. Along the Pacific time zone line, from Montana to Arizona, there is another swath of drought-stricken states.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, 34 states are facing varying degrees of drought.

Around the planet, Africa and Asia also are experiencing serious drought. Dust bowls in parts of China have sent clouds of soil into the upper atmosphere that have crossed the Pacific Ocean, having an impact on our Pacific Northwest. A chunk of ice shelf broke off Antarctica recently that was the size of the state of Delaware.

According to the federal government's national assessment of localized global warming impacts for our region, over the last century the average temperature has increased by 2 degrees Fahrenheit.

Analysis of the long-term precipitation picture is more ambiguous. "Over the last 100 years, precipitation has increased by an average of about 0.1 inch per decade, causing a small increase of about 1 inch," according to the federal study Climate Change and a Global City.

But that analysis, conducted by a wide array of the region's top academic and government climate scientists, also concludes that the character of our region's precipitation has changed. Snowfall is diminishing, and that spells trouble for the optimal kind of slow drip recharge that a spring thaw, without thirsty greenery, has historically provided for our surface and subsurface water sources.

"Is this the result of global warming? We can't say," Campbell notes. "But I think we need to manage our water resources in a way that anticipates and recognizes the fact this may be very much what the future looks like."

If the DEP commissioner's dire forecast is right, changing the state's long term attitude about water will require seismic shifts in everything from how we raise taxes to pay for our children's education to learning how to love cacti on our front lawns.

Historically, the state's 566 municipalities jealously guarded their land-use prerogatives in provincial isolation. They were concerned with raising money for their local schools by taxing the developments they approved. They were, however, oblivious to the collective impact of their land-use choices on the natural systems that provided the water they took for granted. Borders can define land, but water flows without regard for jurisdiction.

The framers who conceived our democracy viewed our natural resources as infinite. Our property rights spring right from that optimism. Only time will tell if the democracy we inherited is capable of responding fast enough to effectively meet the challenges posed by potential climate change and the already well-demonstrated downside of rapid development.

The key question remains: How does a 21st Century democracy develop scientific consensus on such a complex and controversial issue, shape a plan for action if it is required, and implement it while remaining sufficiently flexible to respond to additional changes along the way?

It is a question that will be answered over the next decade, and like most complex public policy issues, assessing the range of possible solutions requires delving into decisions made in the past.

WHO OWNS OUR WATER?

STATE RIGHTS, PRIVATIZATION AND THE MULTINATIONALS

Here in the Garden State, the water is owned by the state, held in trust for the public. No doubt, this is no minor technicality for some homeowners with their own wells who just can't fathom why their lawn should go brown just because the state as a whole is in a drought.

While the state owns the water, the water utilities make a guaranteed rate of return selling us what we, through the state, already own. Now, it is true that the water purveyors have to pump, store, and treat the water before it comes out of our tap. But in New Jersey, from the day the state Legislature started granting private individuals charters to sell water, the state has been the supplier for the water companies and sometimes a kind of partner.

This patchwork public-private amalgam is entirely different from the truly municipally owned and operated New York City water system with its 21 reservoirs, holding 550 billion gallons of water set in a vast 2,000-square-mile watershed spread over several counties. Here in New Jersey, there are still municipally owned water companies. But increased water quality mandates from Washington, which can cost millions to meet, have made it increasingly more likely that the remaining municipal utilities will be bought out or forced to subcontract management of their day-to-day operations to one of the big boys.

Over the years, New Jersey's state government has helped finance hundreds of millions of dollars in tax-free bonds to build or expand reservoirs or construct interconnections for the private water companies, which ultimately facilitates their making a profit and consumers getting what they want. Of course, over time, the utilities pay off the bonds and everybody with a hand to play in the water monopoly game is happy.

In the 19th Century, these private utilities sprang up in the communities they served, invariably founded by well-connected civic leaders already on the boards of directors of other utilities, banks and charities. In just the last two years, however, multinational corporations based in Europe have bought private water companies serving more than 3 million -- over 40 percent of -- New Jersey residents.

The trend toward privatization of the world's potable water supply, increasingly under the control of just a handful of multinational corporations, has some observers worried about the loss of domestic control over such a primary strategic resource. One company alone, Suez Lyonaise of France, which owns the Harrington Park-based United Water Resources, already provides water for 1 billion people globally. For its part, the New Jersey-based subsidiary, United Water, contends the size of its parent company gives it a broader base of technical expertise.

THE RISE OF THE WATER

UTILITIES: FROM STATE CHARTERS TO STATE REGULATION

From its inception, the state has found itself in a perpetual cycle of demand for water outstripping supply. Water purveyors would rely on one river, only to have the very development their water made possible lead to the pollution of the source. Here, the legacy of New Jersey's municipal balkanization made cooperative ventures, irrespective of how worthwhile they might be in the long run, ever suspect.

Over the decades, water purveyors extended their reach farther and farther geographically, staying a half step ahead of the pollution that increased population would bring. These water supply projects could take decades and often were fought by local residents who resented the incursion into their way of life purportedly for the greater good.

According to historian Samuel Popper's book Newark, N.J.: 1870-1910, the state Legislature in 1800 took its first dip into the water business when it granted a group of investors a charter to form the Newark Aqueduct Company which "drew water from wells, springs and distant Branch Brook. The water was conveyed through wooden mains to homes and factories."

By 1800, reports Robert D. Carlisle in his book Water Ways, a profile of the Elizabethtown Water Company, Newark was one of 17 water systems in a nation not yet 25 years old.

Just a year earlier, the enterprising Aaron Burr had won a similar state charter in New York to create the Manhattan Company with the exclusive franchise to supply New York City with water. The company later evolved into the Chase Manhattan Bank. In 1832, a cholera outbreak killed 3,500 people in New York City; five years later, 4,000 New York City immigrants were undertaking the heavy construction involved in building a municipally owned, 5-square-mile reservoir that would be gravity fed to the city. It took five years to complete.

Back in New Jersey, in 1845 the Mount Holly Water Company opened for business using the Rancocas Creek. By1852, Jersey City was tapping into the Passaic River to fill its reservoir, and by 1854, the New Jersey Legislature had chartered the Elizabethtown Water Company. Wasting water was considered a serious crime punishable by a $500 fine and a half year in the county jail.

The nine original board members of the Elizabethtown Water Company were no doubt visionary risk takers. They included merchants, bankers, a physician and a lawyer who also served on the boards of the city's key civic organizations. The first board included Colonel John Kean, the great-grandfather of future Governor Thomas H. Kean.

The board's reputation was above reproach, yet it was connected politically in a direct way that would be considered a conflict of interest today: Four of the nine charter members sat on the Elizabeth City Council, and in 1867, the state Legislature passed a special bill permitting the City of Elizabeth to float a bond issue to benefit the water company's expansion plans.

In 1869, the Hackensack Water Company (the corporate precursor of United Water Resources) was founded in Bergen County's county seat and won approval from Trenton. The lack of water in Hackensack was all too evident, Adrian Leiby, the water company's official historian, noted. As late as 1873, an arsonist was able to torch three buildings in one night and the responding engine companies had no functioning public water line to draw upon. The fires spurred action.

By fall of the next year, everybody who was anybody was on the grandstand to celebrate the completion of a reservoir and the arrival of water pressure downtown on Hackensack's lower Main Street. "The company (Hackensack Water) had done what the town could not," a local paper reported.

But in just a few years, the great financial panic of 1873 ruined Charles Voorhis, a founder of the Hackensack Water Company who was a former judge and a confidante of President Abraham Lincoln. By 1880 the engineering company that had actually built the water system was left holding bonds it had taken as payment and took over the system.

In his history The Hackensack Water Company, Leiby writes that the water company really began to hit its stride in 1881 when the Stevens family of Hoboken, whose patriarch had invented the first locomotive, decided to put its considerable political and financial heft behind the Hackensack Water Company, delivering water to Hoboken.

But no sooner had Hoboken signed on than a drought that began in the summer and lasted into fall left portions of the Hackensack River dry. For the second time in just two years, the Hackensack Water Company was sold. The engineering company that had taken it over could not raise the money needed to make the improvements needed to keep up with the demands of an expanding service area.

The new company's board included Julian Kean, whose uncle was Elizabethtown's Colonel Kean; Edwin Stevens, whose father had founded Stevens Institute of Technology; and New York investor and philanthropist Robert deForest.

But as confident as the newspapers may have felt about the ability of the private sector to deliver what the state could not, the state Legislature thought there was a key role for the government to play. Without potable water, rural backwaters would be destined to remain cut off from the great prosperity sweeping a nation that was on the fast track to world power status.

So the Legislature established the first State Water Commission in 1882. While it was disbanded two years later, the Commission did first conceptualize the building of the Wanaque reservoir in Passaic's Ringwood. (It would not be until 1930 that the Wanaque would finally be on line.)

In 1885, the Hackensack Water Company responded to widespread complaints about "fishy" tasting water by injecting compressed air into the water at its New Milford facility. By the turn of the century, the Water Company was looking into what were then considered cutting-edge sand filters to reduce the presence of microscopic bacteria. The practice of filtering water in that way had started in European countries where population growth had compromised watersheds.

Over at the Elizabethtown Water Company, Chief Engineer Lambert Battin was expressing concerns over what his counterparts today would call non-point source pollution of his water source. "It is my conviction that the unpleasantness of our water is due to the large amount of earth...carried during heavy rainstorms from watershed into our mains to contaminate our water."

In 1902, the Hackensack Water Company found itself targeted by The Record of Hackensack, which undertook an investigation into how the water company maintained its facilities. On one outing, Leiby records, a reporter found not only dead eels, but a dead cat floating in one of Hackensack's water storage tanks.

Local and county health officials started to monitor the entire watershed for what were believed to be sources of possible contamination. Attention was focused on the proximity of outhouses to streams that fed the reservoir, and there was concern over the fact that runoff from the streets ran into the river that recharged the reservoir -- a practice that continues today. Outhouses could still be found throughout the region. The president of the Bergen County Medical Association, citing a report he had commissioned, charged that the water was not safe to drink without boiling it.

Getting water under a microscope helped make the link between water quality and pristine watersheds. By 1900 the New York City Board of Water Supply was pursuing land in the remote Catskills. (It would take 27 years to get all the land and infrastructure in place to bring the first drops of Catskills water to New Yorkers.)

Back across the Hudson, the Hackensack Water Company went about the task of expanding the Oradell Reservoir and in the spring of 1903 started building a new filtration plant.

The utility also decided to take the proactive watershed management step of acquiring the Spring Valley Water Company, a local water company just over the state line in Rockland County, N.Y. Hackensack's president at the time, Robert deForest, said the company had to make the move "in order to secure cooperation between the company and the Hackensack Company in protecting watershed from which both companies draw their source supply from pollution."

Finally, the state government also was trying to get a handle on the future with the creation of a State Water Supply Commission. This was the first time the state reserved for itself the power to do long-term planning, supervise the construction, and handle the day-to-day operation of the reservoirs it built.

This was the era of trust-buster President Theodore Roosevelt, and while the public counted on water, gas, electric and train service, it became increasingly skeptical about the interlocking directorates and trusts that owned them. But while other states challenged the robber barons, muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens branded New Jersey the "traitor state" because it welcomed with open arms the trusts that would eventually evolve into holding corporations. Here the rosters of directors they shared linked banks, rails and utilities.

But even the "traitor state" had its limits. In the 1910 New Jersey gubernatorial election, Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson ran and won on a Progressive platform that included giving real teeth to a Public Utilities Commission that had been established three years earlier merely as an advisory board.

Just a few years later, however, a 1915 bond issue to fund the state's attempt to buy a tract in Wharton for a reservoir was defeated at the polls. Not long after that, the State Water Supply Commission's functions were absorbed into the Department of Conversation and Economic Development. But the forces for coherent state-driven water supply planning were back the following year with legislation to create the North Jersey and South Jersey Water Supply Commissions. The North Jersey Water District took off and helped supply water to thirsty towns in a dozen counties including: Sussex, Warren, Hunterdon, Morris, Passaic, Somerset, Middlesex, Union, Essex, Hudson, Bergen and Monmouth. However, the concept of a similar coherent, non-investor-driven water authority for southern New Jersey never materialized.

SHARING THE RAMAPO RIVERSHED:

THE CASE FOR BISTATE COOPERATION

Negotiating the invariable turf battles among water purveyors, users, and towns and counties within the state was tough, but coordinating claims with neighboring states for a shared river like the Delaware was even more difficult. While the Garden State's water saga is rife with contention, there are some examples of farsighted cooperation. The foundation for a compact that endures to this day between New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Delaware was laid in 1925 with the proposed Delaware River Basin Interstate Allocation Compact.

There would be at least one trip to the U.S. Supreme Court to sort out who got what in water allocation, and it would not be until President Kennedy was in office that the Interstate-Federal Delaware River Basin Compact would finally become law, providing a regional mechanism to holistically manage the natural resource base and equitably distribute the water it produces.

To this day, no such formal cooperation exists between New York State and New Jersey when it comes to the beleaguered Ramapo River, which provides some or all of the drinking water for almost 2 million New Jersey residents.

The river starts in Monroe, N.Y., more than 16 miles from the New Jersey state line in Mahwah. Along its winding river course on the New York side, 7 million gallons of treated sewer effluent is dumped into the Ramapo River every day. A legacy of industrial and solid waste sites along the river on both sides of the state line continue to endanger its recovery.

While large portions of the riverscape are set aside for open space, the Ramapo has been victimized by its proximity to the nexus of major arteries like the New York Thruway, Route 17 and Interstate I-287. The status of this river has become something of a lifelong obsession for Geoffrey Welch, chair of the Ramapo River Committee.

Welch helped blow the lid off a scandal in the 1980s involving the creation of an illegal toxic waste dump on the banks of the Ramapo in Tuxedo, N.Y. In that case, an organized crime figure was ultimately convicted for killing the dump's manager. The local inspector for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, a local judge and police chief were all convicted for their role in contaminating the river.

Welch, a composer and transplant from New York City some 20 years ago, now lives in Torne Valley, on the New York banks of the Ramapo. Over the years, he has made it a point to connect the communities on both sides of the state line that have a stake in the fate of the Ramapo.

He was encouraged when New Jersey and New York teamed up together to purchase 18,000 acres of nearby Sterling Forest. "About a third of Sterling Forest was in the Ramapo River watershed. If that had been developed as planned, the Ramapo River would have been in even worse shape, " says Welch. "But what remains to be done is truly a watershed-based management (program) that disregards political boundaries."

Welch is particularly concerned about a proposal to build a golf course and 103 luxury homes right in the heart of the "saved" Sterling Forest. "It would be a shame if after spending years and $70 million to save the forest, this exclusive development happened right at its center," says Welch.

Sterling Forest Corporation still holds the remaining 600-acre tract not acquired for open space and is pursuing the resort/golf course concept. Last month, environmentalists were alarmed when the developer sold off a water utility that serves nearby homes and businesses to United Water Resources.

These days, Welch finds that his calls to Trenton are being returned. "When we had the threat of two power plants on a major tributary of the Ramapo that could have significantly affected its water resources, New Jersey officials were quick to join us in our fight to stop them."

700 ACRES FOR A DOLLAR:

FIGHTING A QUESTIONABLE LAND DEAL

At the turn of the 20th Century, the Hackensack Water Company had a civic giant of a president in Robert deForest. Not only was he President of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but he helped set up the Provident Loan Society as a philanthropy to help drive down the usurious loan rates being charged to the city's working class.

He was equally forward-thinking regarding both business and environmental issues. He understood that the quality of the water upon which he staked his reputation depended on how the watershed through which it flowed fared. He saw that the Hackensack Water Company needed to transcend the state line that divided the watershed, so the utility acquired the Spring Valley Water Company, which served Rockland County, to help safeguard the integrity of the watershed the states shared.

By 1983, the same company under different leadership would convince the State of New Jersey's Public Utilities Commission to allow it to sell 700 acres of watershed land that had grown only more precious ecologically in the decades since the utility had used the power on eminent domain to acquire it. By the 1980s, only 6 percent of the land in the region was undeveloped, and environmentalists were determined not to let these critical buffer lands be subsumed by sprawl.

The transfer permitted the Hackensack Water Company to sell to its unregulated real estate subsidiary for $1 the very same lands it had been telling municipalities for decades to treat as essential conservation lands for tax purposes.

In fact, as late as 1984, a Hackensack Water Company brochure was informing the public that "each of our reservoirs is encircled by undeveloped land, left in its natural state, shielding the water supply from possible pollutants." Meanwhile, they were telling state utility regulators and local land-use officials that thanks to new treatment technologies they no longer needed to hold the same amount of land.

But the issue was not just environmental. In 1989, Alfred Slocum, the state's Public Advocate, testified that the land transfer had "permitted these water utilities and their related companies to enjoy a questionable legal fiction that an 'arms length' exchange has occurred with the state's approval."

The state Board of Public Utilities had waived for the Hackensack Water Company the requirement that any land or asset belonging to a regulated utility be sold at public auction to the highest sealed bidder, assuring that the company got the best price for the asset it acquired as a state-sanctioned monopoly. Normally, the BPU wants the utility to get the highest price for any asset to diminish the likelihood of having to raise utility rates for the public in the future.

At the time, Assemblyman John Rooney, R-Bergen, said he did not know which was worse -- the "rip-off" of the ratepayers or the "run-off" pollution from the additional development. The utility was truly way ahead of the state Department of Environmental Protection, which had no regulation governing how close development could come to a reservoir.

The New Jersey Legislature passed the Watershed Moratorium Protection Act in 1988 to prevent the loss of any additional watershed lands to development until the DEP could put some kind of buffer regulations in place, which to this day has yet to be done. The DEP has mapped the watersheds and put into place watershed review panels, something the public started doing on its own as early as 1949.

When the Moratorium Act was approved, local Pascack Valley environmentalists operating as the Save the Watershed Action Network (SWAN) wanted to try to recover for conservation the initial 700 acres transferred from the utility for development. They used a combination of political and legal maneuvers, which included court action on their behalf by the Environmental Defense Fund.

One of the founders of the group, Lori Charkey, says she first found out about the utility's real estate plan when she was working as a temp at the company's headquarters in Harrington Park. "Back in 1981, I said to a colleague how beautiful the view was of the reservoir from her office window," recalls Charkey. "She told me it was going to be chopped up. I thought the Water Company was protecting the watershed and it was doing the exact opposite."

Over 20 years later, SWAN has 800 families as members. Co-founder Mark Becker, also of Westwood, says the fight to safeguard the watershed continues. "I guess of that original 700 acres we have saved about two thirds," says Becker. He is frustrated that with money so tight for open space preservation, the public had to spend tens of millions of public dollars to reacquire land that should never have been allowed to leave the utility's rate base in the first place.

On a recent May night, the pair rushed home from work and ate quickly so they could get to a Planning Board meeting over in Rivervale to monitor the progress of an application by the utility's real estate division, now called United Properties. The application calls for the development of a couple hundred town houses and single family homes on forested land where the Cherry Brook and Hackensack River meet, adjacent to the Lake Tappan Reservoir.

On the table is a deal to set aside 18 acres out of the 44-acre subdivision for open space. The asking price for the 18 acres? A cool $8 million.

"It is important to save it all to maintain the ecological integrity of the whole region," says Becker. "It is one of the last parts of the upper watershed which is a forested parcel that is critical to wetland preservation and water recharge and natural filtration."

On the mad dash to the Planning Board the sun slips past sunset. Charkey insists we take a detour to the doomed acreage. Over the years SWAN and the water company have, on occasion, closed ranks . This time Charkey is working with the water company to stop teenage all-terrain vehicle (ATV) riders who are tearing up these watershed lands for fun before the developers can tear them up for profit.

"Mark, let's see if they got the fence up," suggests Charkey. When we arrive at the dead end of Stanley Place, she complains. "What kind of fence is that?"

There is no hint from the street what lies just a few yards into the woods. Once inside, for as far as the eye can see, are cathedral-high red pines planted with an Escher- like precision by the water company decades ago.

The daylight is all gone, and the forested ridge line is cool as we race back to the car to make the meeting. At Rivervale's Borough Hall, the lot is not full. Inside, the night's proceedings are underway and homeowners sit with their lawyers waiting for their turn before the Planning Board.

As Becker and Charkey take their seats on the metal folding chairs, they are quietly welcomed by the friendly faces of sympathetic townsfolk. They check the agenda and are heartened to see the water company's application is listed. Behind them slides in a fellow regular, who whispers, "They canceled."

"You know they'll be back in July or August when everybody's on vacation," quips Becker.

For its part, United Water Resources says it is bound by an agreement it has with the developer, and that conservationists are free to do what they have done in other instances and strike the right price for the balance of the land.

SPRAWL AND McMANSIONS:

DIMINISHING WATER QUANTITY AND QUALITY

Back in 1895, when deForest ran Hackensack Water, New Jersey had just 2 million people, most of whom were concentrated around the established urban centers. By 1960, the state had tripled in population and the post-World War II suburban boom was on. According to the Regional Plan Association's 1996 report A Region At Risk, from the 1960s on, the rate of land consumed by development had outpaced the region's population growth by more than four to one.

"Population in the region has grown only 13 percent in the last 30 years, but the amount of developed land has grown 60 percent," the RPA reported."That means, since 1964, development in the region has raced across two million acres.....Places like Vernon and Plainsboro in New Jersey grew tenfold."

Even as New Jersey voters in 1995 passed their tenth, and most generous, Green Acres bond issue to set aside more open space, the pace of development quickened, said Jeff Tittel of the Sierra Club. "We were losing land at an even faster pace in the 1990s with the average new lot size jumping up to 2.7 acres per family."

A recent study by the US Forest Service concluded that in the state's critical Highlands region, which shelters water supplies for millions, increasing development pressures have resulted in the loss of 5,200 acres of wilderness annually. The Forest Service projects that if current zoning and construction trends remain in place, the region's population could jump by 48 percent to 2 million. Urban sections of the state currently count on water exports from the Highlands that may not be available in the future.

Today, with 8 million people, New Jersey has four times the population that it had in 1895, and that population has been sprawling exponentially farther and farther from the state's urban core. The number of people and businesses needing water has grown dramatically, even as the amount of watershed land and natural resource base capable of catching and storing the needed water has been vanishing.

In New Jersey, just over half of the population, primarily in the north, is dependent on surface water bodies like reservoirs. Just under half, mostly in the south, count on groundwater supplies that can be tens of feet or even hundreds of feet below ground in aquifers.

There is still a lot about the hidden world of hydrology that is educated guesswork. Even now, earth scientists and hydrologists are trying to get a handle on how water levels in subsurface aquifers affect stream flow and surface water levels. But for humans to get the maximum benefit of rain when it falls, the earth or surface freshwater bodies have to be there to catch it.

Sprawl development can short-circuit this water cycle. "As we build more impervious surfaces (like roads and parking lots) there is no place for the water to go to recharge the aquifer," says Butch Kinerney with the US Geological Survey.

And what of the streams, rivers and reservoirs increasingly encroached upon by development? Ultimately, whatever is done to the land around water sources like reservoirs, rivers, streams and well recharge areas determines the fate not only of water's quantity, but water's quality.

"In the first five to ten minutes of a storm, the rain hitting surfaces like parking lots picks up everything that has been deposited on that surface, like gasoline, anti-freeze, or oil," says Dr. Angela Cristini, a marine biologist from Ramapo College who has been the recipient of $1.5 million in grants from the National Science Foundation.

This common kind of non-point source contamination has been on the rise all around the state, even as federal and state efforts to stop point source pollution discharges from factories and sewer plants into rivers and streams have enjoyed great success. A recent U.S. Geological Survey study found trace elements of everything from antibiotics to birth control in four streams evaluated in New Jersey.

Counting on water treatment alone to safeguard water quality, as opposed to watershed management, can be a deadly mistake. Less than 10 years ago, in 1993, a water-borne cryptosporidium outbreak in Milwaukee killed 100 and sickened thousands.

In contrast to geologic time, our lifespans -- even the century-and-a-half we have been trying to figure out public water policy -- are equivalent to the one-day wonder of a fruit fly. Yet in just the 50 years since World War II we have made such major alterations in our landscape that we are increasingly vulnerable to both a decline in water quality and availability even if we are fortunate enough to have average rainfall.

Candy Ashmun, who sits on both the State Planning Commission and the Pinelands Commission, notes that at the local level, where all of New Jersey's land-use decisions are made, the adequacy of water supply for proposed development has always been taken for granted.

Even on those rare occasions when municipal planners popped the water supply question, all they got were pro-forma non-responsive answers, Ashmun said. "For decades, local towns contemplating whether a proposed development had sufficient water supply got a non-substantive answer from water utilities, who said they had the franchise to provide water but never answered the real question as to whether they had sufficient supply or not."

Kevin Dole, spokesman for United Water Resources, which provides water to one out of eight New Jersey residents in the state's most densely populated northeast corridor, says the water company cannot legally turn down any consumer.

"Developers come to us after they have gotten their municipal and county approvals," says Dole. "Then we look at our tariff which requires that we not discriminate and provide service to all applicants."

United Water Resources is 90 percent reliant on surface water reservoirs. Traditionally, spring is when water purveyors hit their high water mark with supplies swollen by the melting of winter ice and snow.

"Last year we were at 95 percent capacity," Dole says. "This spring reservoir levels were at 67 percent capacity." The tight DEP restrictions on outdoor water use did buy the United Water Resources service area much-needed breathing room. "A year ago this past May our demand was 140 million gallons a day.This year it was down to 92 million gallons a day."

Over the years, Dole notes, there have been some gains in water conservation through more efficient water fixtures, but those savings have more than been consumed by the arrival of the 1990s McMansions.

These days, new construction can mean the construction of palace packages that come with a different bathroom for each day of the week and a lawn so uniformly lush it could be pressed into service as a putting green.

"A household with an irrigation system uses five times the water a household used to use," says Dole. "For years on the East Coast we have taken a plentiful water supply for granted. But now demand and population growth requires we rethink water management. Our expectations have to be readjusted to match the available water supply and the environment."

McGREEVEY'S LIST:

STRENGTHENING WATERSHED PROTECTION

By mid-April, the record-breaking, summer-like heat and a lack of rainfall reduced the available oxygen in the state's lakes and ponds. The one-two punch combination left more than 1,000 fish belly up in Plainfield's Cedar Brook Park alone.

On Earth Day, Governor James E. McGreevey used a press conference at Round Valley Reservoir to announce what was a major shift from the prior policy of former Governor Christie Whitman when it came to watershed protection. Under the new guidelines, the DEP would have the power to turn down, or alter, development proposals if they would degrade the water quality of any one of six major streams or nine reservoirs.

Taken in the aggregate, the streams and reservoirs located in Bergen, Passaic, Sussex, Warren, Hunterdon, Morris, Monmouth, Burlington and Atlantic counties represent the water source for 3.5 million state residents.

DEP Commissioner Brad Campbell says he gets the connection between water quality and quantity and saving the remnants of watersheds.

"Certainly it is the case that our forests and our wetlands in the headwaters of our water supply are an important factor in being able to store water naturally and retain water both in the ground and surface waters," says Campbell. "So the loss of these natural areas is going to lead to the impairment of our water supply."

McGreevey's move was cheered by the state's environmental groups, who had spent years consulting with and cajoling the Whitman administration to come up with watershed management rules that meet the mandate set by the state Legislature more than a decade earlier.

For Lori Charkey, Mark Becker and the SWAN environmental activists, however, Governor McGreevey's pronouncement did not reach far enough.

Lake Tappan Reservoir did not make McGreevey's list, so the governor's declaration will not help them in their quest to save those last 44 acres in Rivervale. But they know that if they don't keep trying, nothing will be saved at all.

Robert Hennelly of Brookside is a contributing editor of New Jersey Monthly and covers New Jersey for WNYC, National Public Radio in New York City. His last article for New Jersey Reporter dealth with the organizational culture of the New Jersey State Police.

George Aronson of Morristown is a free-lance photographer and conservationist whose work focuses on open space preservation. This is his first work for New Jersey Reporter.