NJ counties with the highest and lowest property taxes
NJ counties with the highest and lowest property taxes Read More »
NJ Highlands work opportunity for a trail planner, mapper
The New Jersey Highlands Council is soliciting proposals from qualified firms with varied expertise in trails planning and mapping to map the Highlands Trail and design and implement an associated signage program.
Deadline for submissions is Friday, April 26, 2019 at 1 p.m.
RFP: www.nj.gov/njhighlands/news/rfp.html#1
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Connecticut’s solar panel industry presses for change in state law it sees as threat to its existence
Panels are placed on a solar
array installed on the roof of a Bristol church in this April 2018 file photo.
The solar industry is lobbying to change a law that governs how residential
users generate solar power. (John Woike)By STEPHEN SINGER | HARTFORD COURANT Connecticut’s solar industry and environmental advocates are fiercely lobbying state lawmakers to reverse or at least delay action they took last year changing how consumers are compensated for solar energy generated from rooftop panels.About three dozen workers in the industry that installs solar panels gathered Wednesday at the Capitol, urging legislation they say will save industry jobs in Connecticut, estimated at more than 2,000. The legislature’s clean energy caucus said the state’s solar industry faces an “existential crisis.”Tim Schneider, co-owner of Earthlight Technologies, an Ellington installer of solar panels that employs 69 workers, said if changes are not made to last year’s law, “I’ll be laying off half my crew.”The 2018 law schedules the termination later this year of net metering, a way residential users are credited for solar energy for electricity they add to the grid.Like this? Click to receive free updatesEnding net metering “takes the financial incentive off the table,” said Michael Trahan, executive director of Solar Connecticut Inc., the industry trade group.In its place would be a system of tariffs, or charges applied by energy providers to customers for electricity use. Connecticut’s solar industry, environmental advocates and others say tariffs work in states where solar energy accounts for 10 percent or more of electricity.In Connecticut, it’s about 2 percent, Trahan said.Stephen Lewis of South Windsor told state lawmakers in written testimony for a recent public hearing that he would not have installed home rooftop solar panels in 2017 without net metering.“I use my home solar to pay for my already efficient home electric use, to charge my EV for a daily commute and have now charged 17,000 all electric miles, and to help pay for my home heat pump so I do not need to use as much home heating oil,” he said.Rep. Jonathan Steinberg, D-Westport and a member of the legislature’s energy and technology committee, said a pause for a couple of years would help policymakers gather more information.The 2018 law was a “radical departure, making a rather precipitous lurch,” he said.Environment Connecticut State Director Chris Phelps told lawmakers they have the opportunity to change the 2018 law and “restore policies supporting continued growth of solar power” in Connecticut.“Over the past eight years, hundreds of megawatts of solar power have been built statewide,” he said. “Solar power, ranging from large grid-connected systems to single homes with rooftop panels, is helping move our state towards a renewable energy future.”Katie Dykes, commissioner of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, told lawmakers in written testimony at a recent public hearing that the 2018 law began a transition of Connecticut’s on-site energy generation, such as rooftop solar panels, “to a more market-driven, competitive, cost-effective and transparent framework.”She said more time may be needed for project developers and financiers to adapt business models to new policies and compensation structures “and for the electric distribution utilities to adjust and modernize their metering and billing systems.”“An extension of time should not, however, halt or reverse the progress to date on new tariff development,” Dykes said.Patrick McDonnell, vice president of regulatory affairs at UIL Holdings Corp., the parent company of United Illuminating, said the 2018 law is an example of a “deliberate strategy” to promote zero-carbon energy.“While these changes are critical adjustments to the incentive policies that are important to transition renewable energy from a subsidy based offering to one that competes in the competitive energy, there needs to be a smooth transition to accomplish these goals,” he told lawmakers.Like this? Click to receive free updates
Fire sale? Philadelphia’s Kensington-Port Richmond scrapyards are cashing out to developers
The industrial stretch along Lehigh Avenue is being filled up with condos.
Lehigh and Aramingo Ave.
SYDNEY SCHAEFER / BILLY PENN
Max Marin reports for BillyPenn
The industrial strip along the Lehigh Avenue corridor — home to that scrapyard fire of mythological proportions last year — is one condo closer to calling it a night.
While the sale has yet to be finalized, Bruce Paul Auto Parts is the second salvage yard within a year to cash out along this stretch of open land between the suddenly-booming Kensington and Port Richmond neighborhoods. Developers scooping up the 80,000-square-foot parcel have already begun pitching their plans to community groups.
The proposed project — four apartment buildings featuring some commercial space — is still very much in the nascent stages, requiring both zoning variances and community input before it can move forward. But it’s a sign of things to come for the rapidly gentrifying borderlands where long-standing industrial beacons are giving way to the forces of market-rate housing.
Bruce Paul says the jig is up for the junkyard kings in this part of town.
“Anybody that’s working with their hands can’t afford to stay around here anymore,” Paul told Billy Penn. “I’m not gonna put up with my taxes doubling every other year. They’re forcing everybody out. Welcome to Philadelphia.”
Scrapyards, opioids and developers
It’s been a tumultuous year on the strip where Paul’s yard sits. Last summer’s massive inferno at the Philadelphia Metal & Resource Recovery brought increased scrutiny to the cluster of junkyards.
Some neighbors aired grievances about the environmental hazards of such scrapyards existing in close proximity to residential neighborhoods. The multi-million-dollar developments now going up will likely intensify those concerns.
“I work seven days,” Paul said. “They don’t want to see my cranking up the crane on a Sunday.”
The development tide is swelling in tandem with the city’s efforts to clean up the opioid-ravaged neighborhoods around the scrap strip. In January, officials shuttered the last of four homeless encampments that sprung up along the Lehigh trestle and under the bridges. Developers are now rehabbing old factory buildings that crumbled into Kensington’s drug era, which stand as bleak reminders of a neighborhood the city turned its back on for decades.
Throughout the decline, however, scrapyards have been a steadfast presence. After Paul’s closes its gates for good, three auto- and scrap-related businesses will remain along this stretch of Lehigh — including Philadelphia Metal & Resource Exchange.
Last September, a few months after the fire there, owner David Feinberg settled his outstanding code violations with the city for $125,000.
The scrap metal industry has suffered heavy blows in recent years, many tied to the global economy and less to neighborhood development. Feinberg thinks he can survive — but for how long he isn’t sure. “Who knows?” Feinberg said.
NJ ‘dreamers’ among those given new hope by House bill
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., left, listens to the life story of Jesica Garcia, center, from the Los Angeles area, as House Democrats introduce the Dream and Promise Act at the Capitol on March 12, 2019. (AP Photo | J. Scott Applewhite)
WASHINGTON — Rey Amaya, a sophomore engineering student at Fairleigh Dickinson University, is in line for an internship this summer. But the job lasts until the end of August and Amaya has no assurances he will be able to remain in the U.S. that long.
He’s applied to renew his status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (better known as DACA) that the federal courts so far have blocked President Donald Trump from doing away with. But he doesn’t know the outcome.
Brought to the country at age 5 from El Salvador, Amaya, 19, grew up in the U.S. but could face deportation if Trump gets his way.
So Amaya has put his hopes in legislation introduced earlier this week by House Democrats. The Dream and Promise Act would allow the so-called dreamers like Amaya to remain in the U.S. for at least 10 years, and permanently if they spent two years in college or in the military or hold a steady job.
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“I consider this country my home,” Amaya said Thursday on a conference call with lawmakers and advocates organized by Make the Road New Jersey, an Elizabeth-based group that helps unauthorized immigrants.
The bill “would give us full belonging in our country. This legislation is an important first step.”
Trump revoked protections for the dreamers in September 2017, overturning President Barack Obama’s order allowing them to stay.
Lawmakers then sought to work with the president on a bipartisan immigration bill, including funding for a southern border wall and letting the dreamers remain in the U.S., but Trump rejected the effort, saying he did not want immigrants from “shithole countries.”
The president also sought to end temporary protected status to immigrants escaping violence or natural disasters. One of those with such status, Sonia Yanes, came from Honduras and also would be protected from deportation under the House Democrats’ legislation.
“It’s a piece of mind for me and my family,” said Yanes, of Dover, who earned her masters degree in the U.S. and is now working as a manager in a pharmaceutical factory. “This will bring relief to all of us. This country is my home country. I love this country.”
The legislation would affect as many as 115,000 Garden State residents, according to New Jersey Policy Perspective, a progressive research group.
House Republicans in 2013 refused to take up a Senate-passed bipartisan immigration bill that would have strengthened border security and offered a path to citizenship for an estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants, and have failed to pass any bill since then.
But the Democratic takeover of the chamber last November, combined with Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric and his stepped-up deportation efforts, has given the issue new life.
“Times have changed drastically,” said Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-12th Dist. “This is a bill that is going to pass and it’s going to pass by a very good margin.”
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High-tide flooding worsens, more pollution carried to sea
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| A Charleston, South Carolina resident removes debris from a drain during tidal flooding in October 2015. The city now experiences 50 days of “sunny day” flooding a year. PAUL ZOELLER/THE POST AND COURIER VIA AP |
As sea levels rise, high-tide flooding is becoming a growing problem in many parts of the globe, including cities on the U.S. East Coast. Now, new research shows that as these waters recede, they carry toxic pollutants and excess nutrients into rivers, bays, and oceans.
JIM MORRISON reports for Yale environment 360
As high-tide flooding worsened in Norfolk, Virginia in recent years, Margaret Mulholland, a biological oceanographer at Old Dominion University, started to think about the debris she saw in the waters that flowed back into the Chesapeake Bay. Tipped-over garbage cans. Tossed-away hamburgers. Oil. Dirty diapers. Pet waste.
“This water is coming up on the landscape and taking everything back into the river with it,” says Mulholland, a professor in the Department of Ocean, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences. “I was thinking how no one is counting this stuff (as runoff pollution). It drove me nuts.”
Nuts enough that she decided to sample those waters. That’s why on a recent Saturday morning she was steering her Chevy Bolt EV toward a narrow, flooded ribbon of Norfolk’s 51st Street at high tide. Marsh grasses bordered an inlet of the Lafayette River on one side of the street. A line of houses set back from the street rose on the other. Soon she came upon an overturned trash can, its contents underwater. A few feet away was a box. She opened it, and inside was a toilet. “Oh, this is good,” she said, pulling out her phone for a photo.
It’s an apt metaphor for her pioneering research project, which she has dubbed Measure the Muck.
With global sea levels steadily rising — already up 8 inches in the past century and now increasing at an average of 1.3 inches per decade — the incidence of high-tide “sunny day” or “blue sky” flooding is on the rise, especially along the U.S. East Coast. Those flooding events now routinely wash over sections of cities, and when the waters recede they take with them an excess of nutrients and a toxic mix of pollutants that flows into rivers, bays, and oceans.
Norfolk, which experienced fewer than two days of high-tide flooding annually in the early 1960s, had 14 in 2017. In Wilmington, North Carolina, tidal flooding grew to 84 days in 2016, up from two days 50 years ago. In Lewes, Delaware at the mouth of Delaware Bay, flooding days have topped 25 in recent years, a five-fold increase over a decade ago.
In Charleston, South Carolina, the incidence of sunny day flooding increased to 50 days in 2016, up from four days annually 50 years ago, causing millions of dollars in damage and disrupting travel to the city’s hospital district.
In Miami, sunny day flooding is becoming increasingly severe, accelerating to nearly 20 days a year. In Philadelphia, tidal flooding due to rising sea levels was responsible for 83 out of 120 days of flooding from 2005 to 2014.
An overturned trash can sits in high-tide floodwaters on 52nd Street in Norfolk, Virginia. MARGARET MULHOLLAND
According to a report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), high-tide flooding frequency along the southeastern coast of the United States rose 160 percent from 2000 to 2017. And with sea levels expected to rise another 3 to 6 feet by 2100 because of melting ice sheets and glaciers, scientists warn that much worse is to come. NOAA projects that as many as 85 days of high-tide flooding will occur annually along the southeastern U.S. coast by 2050.
Until Mulholland, however, few if any researchers had examined exactly how much pollution this sunny day flooding was creating. And what Mulholland found shocked her. Analysis of water samples indicates that one morning of tidal flooding along the Lafayette River in Norfolk poured nearly the entire annual U.S. Environmental Protection Agency allocation of nitrogen runoff for the river — 1,941 pounds — into Chesapeake Bay.
“That’s striking,” she says. “How do we expect to restore the bay if we’re not counting a lot of what’s going in?”
Mulholland is focused on measuring nitrogen, including ammonium, because of its effect on algae blooms, which create oxygen-depleted dead zones in bay waters. She said that other pollutants — including oil, gasoline, and trace metals — are also washing into waterways, as evidenced by the petroleum sheens visible on the water during high-tide flooding. “We can see it, and it would be great if we could measure it in the future,” she says. “But we don’t have the analytical chops to measure it so far.”
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