Clean Water In the News

Category 1 for Toms River?

Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 01/19/07

BY KIRK MOORE
TOMS RIVER BUREAU

TOMS RIVER — Fifteen miles upriver from its yacht clubs and rumbling motor yachts, the Toms River is so narrow one can jump across in some spots.

Flowing from its headwaters in Millstone Township and Jackson, the river drains 25 percent of the land area adjacent to Barnegat Bay — carrying with it all the pollution of a burgeoning population, scientists say.

So Thursday night, environmental activists framed their arguments for having the state declare the Toms River a Category 1 stream to provide it with special protections, such as 300-foot buffer areas on either side of the river and its major tributaries, where land clearing and building would be banned.

Buffers "trap the nutrients and pollutants carried by runoff" during rainstorms, said Susan Kennedy of the American Littoral Society, one of the environmental groups that filed a petition Nov. 1 asking the state Department of Environmental Protection to extend Category 1 regulations to the Toms River.

DEP officials have levied Category 1 rules along the Shark, Manasquan and Metedeconk rivers. Some landowners along the upper Toms River are already subjected to even more strict state Pinelands rules for 600-foot buffers, noted Richard Bizub of the Pinelands Preservation Alliance.

But elsewhere along the stream, buffers are as little as 50 feet wide, in areas that have rapidly built up in recent years, Bizub said.

When it comes to paving and building in a river watershed, coverage of 10 percent of the land is a "tipping point" when the diversion of rainwater that used to soak into the ground begins to change the river water chemistry, he said.

The groups' Category 1 petition seeks to widen buffers along the main stem of the Toms and major tributaries like Mirey Run in Jackson and the Union, Davenport and Wranglebrook branches in Manchester and Berkeley.

Long-term scientific monitoring shows changes in the river's chemistry, said Michael Kennish, a research professor at Rutgers University. But the bigger environmental danger is the effect that nitrogen compounds flushing out of the river have in Barnegat Bay, he stressed.

"Once you get into salt water, nitrogen becomes a big deal," Kennish said.

Emitted from suburban sources like fertilized lawns and animal waste, the nitrogen literally fertilizes the bay, enabling rapid growth of undesirable algae, he said.

Some algae are microscopic plants that become algae blooms, darkening bay waters and starving native eelgrass beds of sunlight, Kennish said.

Others are macroalgae, big plants like slimy sea lettuce that smothers the eelgrass and the shellfish that live there, he said.

"There's a good chance the loss of bay scallops is related to the loss of sea grasses," said Kennish, author of a forthcoming report that documents eelgrass declines of 50 percent to 88 percent in Barnegat and Little Egg Harbor bays. "It's chain reaction. The science is there."

The effect extends beyond Barnegat Bay, too, and plays a role in the population dynamics of economically valuable saltwater fish species, said Thomas P. Fote of the Jersey Coast Anglers Association.

Summer flounder spawn offshore, but baby flounders grow up in coastal bays, the broodstock for a fishery that party and charter boat captains say is 40 percent of their business.

"They grow to 9 1/2 inches the first season in the bay,"' Fote said. "Without that life support system, there is no summer flounder. There's no weakfish, no striped bass, no crabs."

Kennedy of the Littoral Society said activists want their supporters to call and write the governor's office and DEP Commissioner Lisa Jackson to urge acceptance of the Category 1 petition.

Peg Sturmfels of the New Jersey Environmental Federation said supporters want to win over local municipal officials also, from township environmental commissions to mayors and planning boards.

"We want these 300-foot buffers. This can't be negotiable," she said.