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On November 3 New Jersey voters will have the opportunity to vote on a ballot initiative to fund the Garden State Preservation Trust Fund. This will provide desperately needed funding to preserve open space and farms in New Jersey. This will protect habitat and our clean water supply. The health of our coast and the quality of our water depends on maintaining the appropriate balance between development and undisturbed lands. These are hard times. The economy will rebound eventually; however, once lands in our coastal watersheds are developed, there will be no coming back. The American Littoral Society is educating the public about the need for this important initiative. To learn how you can help, download the Keep It Green campaign flyer. Download PDF
Last fall the American Littoral Society launched a campaign to convince the citizens and officials in Cumberland County, New Jersey, to implement a county open space and recreation plan. Having a plan in place will qualify this Delaware Bayshore county for significant funds from the state for open space, parklands, public access along waterways and lakes for fishing. Today, Cumberland County is the only county in the state that has no open space and recreation plan in place. Consequently, it forfeits millions of dollars in state matching funds. The county already has a tax for preservation which was implemented in 1994 through a county-wide referendum. Today, that sets aside about $1 million annually for farmland preservation. With the proposed plan in place, these funds could leverage additional millions from the New Jersey Green Acres Program as well as attract more money from private land trusts. The Society sees this plan as critical to protecting Delaware Bay, its tributaries, habitat, and wildlife from the degradation that comes with unplanned development. We also feel that implementing the plan is a matter of environmental justice. The funds it would attract could be used to refurbish and/or build new parks and water access points in historic river towns like Bridgeton and Millville-enabling their citizens to reap (in some cases for the very first time) the benefit of the open space tax they have been paying locally for 15 years. At the time of this writing, support for the plan has reached critical mass. This is due to a many-pronged effort lead by our staff which has, as they say, pulled out all the stops. We have made presentations at countless meetings of town councils, environmental commissions, citizens groups, and the county board of freeholders; secured coverage of the debate over the need for the plan in the press and published numerous opinion pieces in multiple papers; organized support among other groups, especially the South Jersey Bayshore Coalition. We took officials, citizens and other supporters on bus and boat tours to view potential sites for preservation both in the rural and urban areas. As a result, environmental commissions in 5 towns (Hopewell, Vineland, Greenwich, Upper Deerfield and Fairfield) have officially requested their municipal officials and the board of county freeholders to support the plan. Most important, on Wednesday night, July 1, the Cumberland County Board of Freeholders will vote on whether or not to move forward with the Open Space and Recreational Plan. If you live in Cumberland County, we urge you to support this initiative. It will go a long way toward ensuring that Cumberland County avoids the fate of its neighbors to the north: choking sprawl, traffic, out of control taxes, and degraded water quality. We could not have come this far without the help of many citizens of Cumberland County, grass roots organizations and coalitions, forward thinking officials, and, of course, those who have provided the financial support we need for this work including the William Penn Foundation, the Anna-Maria Moggio Foundation, the Environmental Endowment for New Jersey, and our patrons, Yvonne ter Haar-Grant (Society trustee) and Jim Grant.
 As science has revealed new information about the complexity of coastal ecosystems and how watersheds work, the Littoral Society’s sphere of concern has expanded farther and farther upland from the coast, giving birth to our policy of protecting the land to protect the sea. This informs our efforts at all levels from the seats of government to individual citizens’ back yards. We work to shape land use regulations, educate the public about how they (and the officials they put in office) can say no to sprawl, to preserve open space, and engage individuals at the grass roots level through programs like our Monmouth County Shore Stewards.
(If you navigated to this article from the Coastal Reporter newsletter, you can return there by closing this page.) NEW RULES WILL SLOW COASTAL SPRAWL IN NEW JERSEY
Overdevelopment along the coast is one of the leading threats to clean coastal waters. Too much building simply overwhelms the ability of coastal ecosystems to sustain themselves: too much pavement, too much polluted runoff, too much sewage. New Jersey has adopted new rules to control coastal development and protect water quality. These include new policies to direct growth away from environmentally sensitive areas and keep development levels within the “carrying capacity” of the environment. What happens on the land directly affects what happens in coastal waters. As watersheds develop, increased runoff pollutes coastal waters and leads to diminished habitat quality, loss of shellfish and fisheries, and restricts ways people can use the waters. The development that creates these problems is subject to a myriad of rules and regulations at the local, state and federal level, several of which are specifically aimed at addressing environmental impacts to coastal areas. The trick is making the laws work. Scientific assessments of the condition of coastal waters indicate that we’re not there yet (include a link to the NOAA Nearshore Waters Assessment and EPA Coastal Condition Report). Nationally, 37% of estuaries in the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Estuary Program (NEP) are in poor condition. Regionally, Puerto Rico’s NEP estuary (San Juan Bay) is in poor condition, and about 46% of the Northeast Coast, 46% of the Gulf Coast, 36% of the West Coast, and 23% of the Southeast Coast NEP estuaries are in poor condition. (NOAA: Effects of Nutrient Enrichment in the Nation’s Estuaries: A Decade of Change and US EPA: National Coastal Condition Reports) In New Jersey, new rules governing sewers, development and water quality are trying to improve this situation. While these rules were being developed, the American Littoral Society advocated for policies and requirements that would direct development away from environmentally sensitive areas such as threatened and endangered species habitat, high hazard areas and beaches, and wetlands systems. We also sought to place limits on the spread of new sewers into undeveloped parts of coastal watersheds – attacking both a root cause of urban sprawl and exceeding the carrying capacity of coastal systems. The Department of Environmental Protection has adopted all of these recommendations in the new rules. The rules also require counties and municipalities in New Jersey to rewrite their existing plans within 9 months to incorporate these new requirements. While many of the issues of coastal water quality impairment are due to past development practices which didn’t pay attention to the protection of the environment, these new environmental protection standards should help in the restoration and protection of estuaries and coastal waters when new development happens. Read the rules
NJ Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative to Benefit Tidal Marsh Restoration
On January 13, Governor Corzine signed the "Reggie" bill (Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative), creating a program to cap and trade carbon emissions in New Jersey, as a mechanism to reduce the state"s contribution to global climate change. The "allowances" created by the law (the amount of carbon which industry can emit) will be auctioned off, and the proceeds used to create a "Global Warming Solutions Fund" which will fund a variety of energy efficiency and conservation projects: the fund is expected to create $50 - 70 million dollars. As a result of advocacy by the American Littoral Society, one of the fundable activities is tidal marsh restoration. The Intergovernmental Climate Change Protocol has cited tidal marsh restoration as a viable strategy to capture and sequester carbon. Under the law, up to $7 million may be available for this program (along with terrestrial forest protection). This program could significantly advance efforts to restore the tidal marshes of the state, and aid in the fight against climate change. To learn more about how tidal marshes remove CO2 from the atmosphere, download our fact sheet, which we used to educate New Jersey lawmakers about the link between salt marshes and carbon sequestration during our advocacy work. Download fact sheet To Learn More About How to Protect the Land TDR Fact Sheet download pdf The Ins & Outs of TDR--white paper download pdf Coastal Areas at Greater Risk from Development, by Tim Dillingham, as published in the Asbury Park Press, 03.10.05 download pdf
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