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Executive Summary
As the new home of NJPIRG's environmental work, Environment New Jersey can be contacted regarding this report.
New Jersey's anti-degradation
laws need to be updated and strengthened. The Surface Water Quality Standards,
which document the designation status of all New Jersey's surface waters, were
last fully approved in April of 1998. They were last revised in the early 1990s.
In that time, the need to protect New Jersey's waters has grown tremendously,
as the state has grown at unprecedented levels, and in rural areas and pristine
watersheds unaccustomed to rapid development.
Our waterways throughout
the state, from small creeks to our largest rivers and reservoirs, provide us
with our drinking water, habitat for the state's threatened and endangered species
and unique recreational and ecological opportunities. Currently, none of these
important criteria and uses are explicitly protected under the anti-degradation
regulations of the state. The current New Jersey regulations do not specifically
define these criteria, as opposed to our neighboring state's policies that explicitly
include and define public drinking water sources, habitat for endangered and
threatened species and areas of ecological significance.
New Jersey's neighbors,
while they do not have perfect programs, have attempted to link designating
protection for sensitive waterways with these three crucial criteria. New York
links its anti-degradation standards of its drinking water sources with public
health concerns, citing it as key criteria for limiting discharge. Both Pennsylvania
and New York directly link the habitat of waterways that serve endangered and
threatened species as a trigger for anti-degradation protections. While New
Jersey's regulations say they consider exceptional ecological significance,
there is no biological assessment standard set, despite the fact the state conducts
thousands of tests annually. Both Pennsylvania and New York have biological
benchmarks and waterway reference points listed as criteria for higher levels
of anti-degradation protection.
New Jersey's regulations,
even when they attempt to offer stringent anti-degradation protections, are
not specific enough to give them any weight. And they leave off their list of
criteria some of the most important reasons to ensure waterways are protected
- their status as drinking water sources and the habitat they provide for endangered
and threatened species.
The state needs to promulgate
regulatory changes to its anti-degradation program in the near future, and specifically
it needs to strengthen the criteria for the state's Category One waters to include
drinking water supply, habitat for threatened and endangered species and the
ecological health of the stream. The state also needs to institute well-defined
regulations that do not leave every protection decision at the discretion of
the Department. The state needs to require a provision that the Department "shall"
upgrade to Category One if a waterway segment fulfills all three criteria below:
a. The water segment serves
as a source for public water supply
b. The water segment is located in an area of Special Concern or above on the
Landscape Project's Threatened and Endangered Species Habitat Map.
c. The water segment possesses significant natural features, and is a Federally
designated as "Wild and Scenic," located in an area identified as
'Special Concern' by the State Planning Commission or drains to any National
Wildlife Refuge or any other federal public land.
The state should also strongly
consider adding biological assessment as one of the criteria that would trigger
an increased level of protection. The state could use its extensive biological
assessment network of stream and river testing sites to protect pristine, biologically
diverse waterways before they get polluted instead of identifying them when
they have already become degraded.
Beyond merely altering the
regulations, the state must ensure that these changes are enforced. The state
DEP must be proactive in enforcing discharge restrictions for these Category
One waters, which on the Federal level are Tier 2.5 waters, and in regulating
non-point source pollution through the pollution permitting program in the same
way point source pollution is permitted and regulated. The Department must conduct
discharge and non-point source reviews for proposed projects and rigorously
review permit once they have issued. Most of all, the Department must ensure
that the state's anti-degradation regulations offer strict guidance, not just
mere suggestion, to protect the state's most vital and pristine waterways.
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