Monday: Joint Legislative Task Force on Drinking Water Infrastructure 

On Monday, January 8^th at 10 am, the Legislature will be holding a Joint Legislative Task Force on Drinking Water Infrastructure meeting. They will discuss recommendations concerning water infrastructure and vote on its draft report. The New Jersey Sierra Club believes that the combination of outdated infrastructure and the Christie Administration’s rollbacks on water protections has led to New Jersey’s problems with our drinking water.

New Jersey has a major problem when it comes the quality and quantity of its drinking water. Their infrastructure is also falling apart. We could be the first state East of the Colorado River to run out of water because of pollution, over-development, and climate impacts. One quarter of our water is also leaking out of these pipes. Due to the drought, we have reservoirs at their lowest recorded levels and salt water intruding on water supply intakes,” said Jeff Tittel, Director of the New Jersey Sierra Club.

The task force –which is chaired by Sen. Linda Greenstein (D-Middlesex) and Assemblyman John McKeon (D-Bergen)– was formed last summer in order to study vulnerabilities to New Jersey’s drinking water supply.

Thanks to old and outdated infrastructure, we’re seeing chemical contamination in our drinking water and pipes that are leaking and falling apart. We have incidents of contaminated drinking water across the state, especially in places like Newark, Paterson, and Camden. We have school children drinking lead in their water and old pipes that leak out sometimes 25% of the water going through them,” said Tittel.  This is at least a $8 billion problem that needs to be fixed immediately to keep the lead out of our schools.

As a result of aging infrastructure, lead from old pipes has caused illness and even in small amounts can lead to brain damage and learning disabilities. It can also lead to childhood development problems and other serious health issues. Thousands of children are diagnosed with lead poisoning in our state each year; over 3,000 in 2015 alone.

“In the last 20 years four New Jersey reservoirs have closed because of pollution and thousands of wells have closed because contamination. Our waters are too low and dirty to take water from. Saltwater intrusion is moving up the Cape May Peninsula faster than the traffic on the Parkway. We have 3500 contaminated sites near drinking water wells. There are well fields in places with contaminated sites in cities such as Camden and Atlantic City,” said Tittel.

Another problem the report identified is that we have not yet identified future needs of our water supply because the Master Plan hasn’t been updated in 20 years. We also need to set a drinking water standard for trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE) to protect public health.

“Governor Christie is calling for a bond to fix our water infrastructure. This $47 million water infrastructure problem is too big for a bond. We need to pay as we go. We also need to do more to clean up our combined sewer overflow because they are a health hazard. Dilapidated storm water systems exacerbate the problem by increasing the water in combined sewers and we need funding to reduce the amount of water in sewers during major storm events,” said Jeff Tittel.

Under the Christie Administration, we have also seen proposals to roll back water quality protections that will increase development and add more pollution to our waterways

“The Christie Administration have made rolled back important rules for water protections such as the Flood Hazard Rules,Water Quality Management Planning Rules and Highlands Septic Density Rules. These rollbacks allow for less protections of waterways and more development in environmentally sensitive areas. They remove stream buffers and allow development on the most pristine streams. This means more pollution in our drinking water and less water availability. Christie delayed The Water Supply Master Plan (WSMP) and came out with a plan that was worthless,” said Tittel.

The task force will meet tomorrow in Committee Room 11, 4th Floor, State House Annex, Trenton, NJ to discuss recommendations concerning water infrastructure and vote on its draft report. 

“We thank the Joint Committee for moving forward with these recommendations.  However, a report without implementation is a hallucination. We need to allocate the proper funds to improve our water infrastructure. A plan without funding is a pipedream. We must protect our drinking water not only by updating infrastructure, but also by protecting it across the state,” said Jeff Tittel, Director of the New Jersey Sierra Club.