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| Chesapeake Bay Magazine |
New Jersey has been talking about overhauling decrepit stormwater systems for a good 10 years. Is real progress finally in the offing?
Tom Johnson reports for NJ Spotlight:
A decade-long legislative push to overhaul the system that controls runoff from storms that pollute New Jersey’s waterways and increases flooding is edging closer to becoming law.
By a narrow 5-3 vote, the legislation (S-1073) won approval from an Assembly committee this past Monday. The bill, debated in one form or another for years, aims to fix a $15 billion problem — repairing and replacing aging, and in many cases failing, stormwater systems.
Those systems end up fouling a large portion of the state’s waters anytime it rains heavily, an occurrence that is becoming more common with climate change already impacting New Jersey. Aging infrastructure, much of it poorly maintained, fails to adequately control runoff from parking lots, streets, and farmland.
The result? A wide range of contaminants, including heavy metals, oil, and fertilizers wind up in streams, rivers, and bays — a major reason why only 5 percent of New Jersey’s waterways meet federal standards for being fishable, swimmable and drinkable.
Taxing impervious surfaces
The way to tackle the problem, advocates say, is to do what up to 40 other states have done: create stormwater utilities and give towns and other governmental entities the ability to impose fees on parking lots and other impervious surfaces to fund improvements to failing systems.
Critics, however, have dubbed the fees another “tax,’’ and another expensive expansion of government bureaucracy.
“I know people get offended at this, but it is a rain tax,’’ said Assemblyman Hal Wirths, a Republican from Sussex County, who voted against the bill in the Assembly Telecommunications Committee.
