NJAS Opinion: Fall, 1994

Four years ago, early in the process of the Hackensack Meadowlands Special Area Management Plan [SAMP], we commented on the scope of the Environmental Impact Statement [EIS] for the SAMP and urged that the FIS address alternatives to wetlands for nonwater dependent development; that mitigation was not the long-term answer to conservation in the Meadowlands; that the remaining wetlands in the district needed to be protected; and that the SAMP should not be out of sync with other programs like the Freshwater Wetlands Protection Act and the State Plan. Our testimony appeared as "NJAS Opinion" in New Jersey Audubon (winter 1990-91, p.26). Now that the EIS for the SAMP is in draft form and moving toward completion, our views have not changed.

Although we supported the SAMP process, we do not support the outcome as reflected in the draft EIS. We recognize that the EIS process has resulted in a decrease of wetlands to be filled by the SAMP projects, from an earlier total of some 1,600 acres to about 855 acres in the current version. But we do not believe that reduction in wetlands fill to be sufficient to protect the estuary. Our view was, and is, that the remaining district wetlands need to be protected; that the proposed development (which is not water-dependent) does not belong in wetlands; that mitigation is questionable long term; and that the reduction in size of the estuary wetlands is an irretrievable loss not adequately compensated by enhancement.

The Hackensack Meadowlands District has lost two-thirds of its wetlands already. Balance has already been struck in the district among the commission's three mandates of taking care of garbage, promoting development, and preserving natural resources. We need to recognize that the Clean Water Act, which came after the Meadowlands mandates, makes the preservation of natural resources prior to the other two mandates. It is too late in the district to talk of balance between conservation and development. If every ten or twenty years, when the players change, the talk is of taking "only 10 percent or only 5 percent," it is plain to see that incrementally the estuary will be lost. The SAMP twenty-year period affords no guarantee that there will not be other Section 404 applications in the district and offers no assurance, that after twenty years, development in the Meadowlands wetlands will cease. The SAMP has essentially issued an 855-acre permit, an outcome that wouldn't occur under the state's other wetlands program, the Freshwater Wetlands Protection Act.

The Meadowlands is a dynamic system, not a static one. It has been a cedar swamp where pirates hid; once a freshwater wetland, now a brackish wetland and becoming more saline over time. With a documented rise in sea level in the New York-New Jersey Harbor estuary of eleven inches per century in the last 300 years (McKenzie, Fisheries of Raritan Bay, 1992), it is clear that the developing long-term trend in the Meadowlands is toward more salt marsh. The trend is most apparent in Sawmill Creek Wildlife Management Area, where the salt marsh cord grass is pushing common reed out. Cord grass is slowly spreading upriver, aided no doubt also by the Oradell Dam and the breaking of the dikes along the Hackensack River in 1950 (Black, New Jersey Nature News, 1967). The food chain is also changing and salt marsh species like laughing gull are using the Meadowlands in greater numbers.

The dynamics of the system make the argument for enhancing wetlands by mitigation suspect in the long term. Enhanced wetlands are frequently not "better than," only different from, other wetlands to which they are compared. This was clear in the case of the wetlands at Mill Creek. Reduction in size of the estuary wetlands is a high price to pay to accommodate development in the wrong place. The argument that only private development dollars will improve wetlands while making them smaller is specious. It is difficult to see how the precedent set in the SAMP will not trigger other future development proposals which are not water dependent or coastally dependent. The fundamental problem is that regional housing and commercial needs have been called local needs and put in wetlands where they don't belong.

We have commented in detail at the Citizen's Advisory Committee meetings on the natural resources of the district; the alternatives to development in wetlands; the needs analysis done by the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission [HMDC] for the district; the Environmental Improvements Program proposed for the Meadowlands; and the projected impacts of the development proposed in the SAMP. It is the impacts analysis that commands most of our critical attention. The impacts analysis in the draft EIS does not adequately deal with acreage loss of wetlands, habitat fragmentation, and needed wildlife space for feeding raptors, waterbirds, and common species in general (the latter not to be forgotten amid concerns for endangered species). The direct impact of 855 acres lost and 1,935 acres indirectly impacted constitute too much of a threat to justify the projected development. The percentage of permanently protected wetlands (i.e., wetlands in conservation ownership or not subject to zoning change) is not large enough.

We are concerned that the Kingsland Plan Area development will affect or destroy the last remaining nesting and roosting area for northern harrier, a state endangered species, and will severely impact feeding migrant and wintering raptors which use this area heavily. These include rough-legged hawk, American kestrel, Cooper's hawk (E), n. goshawk (T), peregrine (E-fed.), and long-eared (T) and short-eared (E) owls. The size and position of this Berry's Creek area is key in the lower Hackensack River marshes. This area links habitat north of Route 3 with the lower meadows. Reduction in size will alter the avian community, not for the better.

The State Plan developed a category of Critical Environmental Site (CES) specifically to deal with important habitats like this one in urban and developed areas. Legally the habitat in this area should be protected because it is still suitable for harrier nesting and roosting. Development of the site could constitute harassment of the species as defined under the State Wildlife Conservation Act, which set up the state endangered species program. The New Jersey Turnpike's own consultants noted in 1986 that proposed Exit 16W would destroy the harrier's chances to survive in the Meadowlands, since there are no longer suitable alternatives. That was a principal factor in stopping the construction of that interchange.

Although the draft EIS tries to deal with impacts on nesting species with buffers, that is not the only habitat issue that the draft needed to address. Both for endangered and common species the issue of habitat size is germane to the breeding as well as transient and winter populations. The owls, the harrier, many of the wintering raptors, the feeding egrets and shorebirds in summer and migration, the coots and moorhens and waterfowl, the marsh wrens, muskrats, and redwings are able to maintain strong populations in proportion as habitat size is maintained. For the federally endangered peregrine falcon, habitat needs to be maintained sufficiently for a recovering population just beginning to use the area, and using it over all four seasons.

If the SAMP EIS had concluded that the remaining wetlands were such an important resource that they had to be protected, and that development, except maybe for a few necessary linears to improve mass transit, had to occur on upland and redevelopment sites or elsewhere, then we could support that conclusion. But such an extensive loss of wetland we cannot condone.