Leah Mishkin reports for NJTV News:
At more than a million acres, the Pinelands occupies most of Southern New Jersey. In 1979, Gov. Brendan Byrne signed the Pinelands Protection Act to preserve hundreds of thousands of acres of forest and streams.
“One of the principal reasons was that we have an aquifer, called the Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer, a huge body of clean water underground that’s used to support agriculture and people’s water supply,” said Carleton Montgomery, executive director of the Pinelands Preservation Alliance.
But the annual report from the Pinelands Preservation Alliance says that supply is under threat.
“In many places, it’s being overexploited and we are losing that water supply,” he said.
Montgomery says the Pinelands Commission — the state agency in charge of protecting the Pinelands — is failing to do just that when it comes to the aquifer.
“Pinelands Commission needs to move quickly to reform its regulations about water allocations, about the withdrawal of water from the aquifer,” Montgomery said.
The report gave the commission good grades for protecting rare roadside plants, its report on the vulnerability of ponds and its educational programs. But the report is not all positive.
“Two of the worst decisions the Pinelands Commission has ever made in its 40-year history were its approval of two new natural gas pipelines through Pineland conservation areas,” Montgomery said.
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