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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.