NJAS Opinion: Spring, 1993

Late 1992 was, in retrospect, a time of struggling recognition, of sobering glances, finally, toward some very unpleasant longstanding societal dilemmas in the United States, dilemmas which have slowly accumulated from many small actions--and inactions. The national debt and economy, and the health care crisis come immediately to mind.

So too, at first glance, on the environment. Whether it's the fate of Barnegat Bay, the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, the Delaware estuary, or the New York-New Jersey Highlands, the outlines of the problem are becoming clearer and clearer, especially recognition that the scope of the problem transcends the boundaries of local government units. But the will to act, and the mechanisms through which to act, still escape us. We seem consumed and frustrated by endless meetings, recommendations, referrals. The general direction of the flow charts is from government agencies who won't act to special advisory bodies who can't, legally, that is, and then back to the authorizing agencies. What's going on here?

There are common themes that run through these examples. One is that for all our various regulatory programs, none can come to grips with the toughest issue there is in environmental matters - what are the limits: how many people can fit in this watershed, this coastal zone and, if you don't or won't answer that, what are the limits on total impervious surface cover or pounds of nutrients or whatever that can be released through a pipe or shed across the land before the water body shows the symptoms of the Chesapeake Bay. For example, crashing finfish and shellfish harvests, so alarming in the previous decade that it led to the formation of a regional planning body that had some new transmunicipal authority to set limits on total nutrient loading for the bay. This is a protection strategy that can be referred to as technological optimism, because it doesn't seek to impose any clear limits on total population, or indirect ones, such as low density zoning, but rather puts in tougher "performance goals on discharges to water bodies and total loadings coming off development surfaces (a reduction in nutrients of 40 percent). Or at least it tries to, because a 1991 evaluation indicated program improvements were necessary if the reduction goal was to be met. Our Pinelands Commission takes a somewhat different approach, less technological and more aimed at protecting environmentally sensitive zones through increasingly tough zoning restrictions. Ideally, the best methodology should combine both approaches after carefully delineating the areas to be protected and incorporating as much of the watershed drainage that flows into these areas as first the science reveals is necessary, and then, as the politics will allow.

Ah then, there's the rub . . . the politics, which does not relish setting either tough zoning density restrictions or runoff standards, but will more often choose the latter because it seems to be a less threatening set of limits. And the politics still has a great deal of trouble facing the reality that the natural features to be protected, like the Great Swamp. have a physical logic that escapes municipal boundaries. Nature may have put the steep headwater terrain largely in one township, the underground acquifer in another, both calling for minimal development, while the least environmentally damaging buildable land may have a political jurisdiction more hostile to growth than the preceding areas.

The unfolding of the Barnegat Bay study is a fair microcosm of how government and some citizens are still blinking in the face of environmental planning realities. Authorized by the New Jersey legislature way back in 1987, it did not issue its final draft report until the fall of 1992. The legislature rightly asked: "Had the Bay reached its limits from development and boating impacts … if not, how much more could it take?" Now, five years later here is the answer, The consultants, who conducted phase two in August 1990, Rogers, Golden & Halpern, Inc., felt that if the 65,000 additional homes allowed by existing municipal zoning were added to the 34,000 dwelling units built in the Study Area (essentially Ocean County) between 1972 and 1986, then the bay would continue to suffer further degradation. They recommended a protection model, based on our Pinelands and Maryland's Chesapeake Bay program, consisting of a management plan, new central authority to implement it, and municipal conformance to the plan. But this recommendation was not followed, even by the citizens of the advisory group, and it is not mentioned in the final draft report. Instead, it is proposed that DEPE's authority under our state's coastal law be turned over to Ocean County, and it recommends, but does not require, that a whole series of "action plans" be carried out at the county level. The final report does, to its credit, emphasize that without better water quality monitoring data and trends analysis, the documentation for action is missing. So, after five years, the legislature, which had the authority to authorize tougher standards and indeed, the actions called for by the consultants in the first place, now has a report from an advisory group that suggests dismantling state authority and passing it along to a county without any requirement or guarantee that something more effective will be implemented: recommends, in effect, the environmental equivalent of a "thousand points of light."

What's missing here is human will, more specifically political will to carry out the obvious. Our state and region seem particularly hamstrung by the political climate of the past twelve years that has been, in general, antigovernment and antiregulatory. This is the chant we hear from legislators, local officials, and building and real estate interests over and over: not another regulatory layer. We disagree, believing that new regional authorities ought to be able to simplify and expedite permitting decisions, and so do some professional consultants. Our hope would be that such issues could be decoupled from the broader political controversy over the role of government. We don't seem to be able to change this mood in the short run, but we will stand our ground on what we believe will work for all these threatened areas while we watch the voluntary efforts string out over years, years we don't think we can afford to lose.

But we do have an answer in the short run for those in New Jersey who simply can't accept the new regional regulatory authorities which could do the job. And that is that our own New Jersey Municipal Land Use Law gives municipalities and/or counties the authority to create regional planning/zoning bodies without having to go to the state or federal government. Indeed, local government bodies are even authorized to carry out these powers across interstate lines without going to a higher power. Funny how, in three years of Highlands talking, no one has pointed this out until we read the MLUL for ourselves.

In light of this little discussed, unutilized authority, if the inclination to protect our resources, our forests and watersheds is as broadly based as every one professes it to be as we sit around these endless meeting tables, and new state or federal regulations are not needed for local and county governments to act, where then is the real problem, other than in their lack of will to act, or even to collect the information that forms the basis of action? We think that the objections over process and proper mechanism merely are ways to delay facing up to dilemmas that have answers and remedies already working in our own state and regional backyard. When the voluntary measures fail and the resources decline due to cumulative adverse impacts, we'll be here waiting to move forward with the tools that work.