FRIENDS OF HOLLAND
HIGHLANDS
130 Shire Road
Milford, NJ 08848
September 21, 2007
Mr. Lawrence J. Baier
Director, Division of Watershed Management
P.O. Box 418
401 East State Street
Trenton, NJ 08625
RE: Comments on Proposed Amendment to the Upper Delaware Water Quality
Management Plan for Huntington Knolls, Block 24, Lots 3 and 13, Holland
Township, Hunterdon County
Mr. Baier:
Friends of Holland Highlands is a local citizens advocacy group in Holland
Township concerned with protecting the environment in our municipality. I
write on behalf of our organization to urge you to use this application for a
site-specific Wastewater Management Plan as an opportunity to reexamine whether
a reduction in the Special Water Resource Protection Area (SWRPA) for the
Category One (C-1) waters on this property should be allowed.
Our group was one of the 27 statewide and local environmental organizations
that mounted a campaign in the fall of 2006 to ask the DEP to stop routinely
reducing the C-1 stream buffers from 300 feet to 150 feet when farmland changed
in use to residential or commercial development. In fact, I wrote the
news release that the groups issued on October 11, 2006. Therefore, I am
very familiar with the DEP's history between February 2, 2004 and January 2,
2007 of automatically reducing the 300-foot buffer when land had been disturbed
by agricultural use, all done in administrative proceedings with no public
notification.
We were gratified when the DEP responded to last fall's campaign with Administrative
Order No. 2007-01, which mandated that the Department would not approve any
encroachment into a SWRPA unless the applicant demonstrates that the functional
value and overall condition of the SWRPA will be maintained in accordance with
the "Special Water Resource Protection Area Functional Value
Analysis" guidance document issued on January 2 of this year.
However, our satisfaction that the FVA would be applied on a going-forward
basis was tempered by our realization that the buffer reductions that were
allowed over the past nearly three years would get a "free pass" from
the application of any meaningful scientific analysis of the impact of reducing
the SWRPA.
The Huntington Knolls project is a perfect example of a project that escaped a
rigorous analysis. In fact, it was so typical that we featured it in our
news release last October, in the long paragraph in the middle of page two of
the attached release.
After the permits for Huntington Knolls were issued in 2004, the secretary of
our group talked by phone with Mr. Peter DeMeo, and he said that he merely
looked at aerial photographs that showed that the fields next to the C-1 stream
on the property had been mowed. He thereby concluded that this
constituted agricultural disturbance, and automatically reduced the SWRPA to
150 feet. I don't single out Mr. DeMeo for criticism. In the fall
of 2004, absent any coherent guidance from the Department, he just did what I
suspect all of his colleagues were doing: rubber-stamped a buffer reduction
on former agricultural land.
The Huntington Knolls property had not been actively farmed for many years, so
none of the arguments you made in your July 10, 2006 email to Michael King of
REALsmart apply. We're not comparing the impact of the "low-density
residential development" that you cited in your email to the Total
Suspended Solids and nutrient runoff loading from active agriculture.
We're talking about mowing a field versus high-density townhouses within the
outer 150 feet of the SWRPA.
I've examined the plats for the first phase of Huntington Knolls, and they show
that half of the proposed 44
townhouses in this first phase and about half of the road that bisects them
will be within the outer 150 feet of the SWRPA intended to protect a tributary
to the Hakihokake Creek.
Moreover, it appears that one of the permits issued subsequent to reducing the
buffer to 150 feet allows an intrusion of 3,207 square feet into the inner 150
foot buffer "in order to construct the residential structures," with
this intrusion to be compensated elsewhere. In that same July 10 email to
Mr. King, you stated, "In the inner 150-feet of the buffer (closer to the
water being protected) redevelopment is confined to the existing footprint of
impervious surfaces. All disturbed areas that are not paved in the inner
150-feet of the buffer on a site undergoing redevelopment, must be either
restored or left undisturbed in perpetuity." I know of no impervious
surfaces in the inner 150 feet near the stream on this property, so it appears
that the Department has improperly allowed an intrusion into the SWRPA 150 feet
from the stream that you alleged would be protected "in perpetuity."
I hope that you will see this application for a sewer extension as an
opportunity to apply a scientific analysis that was absent when the C-1 buffer
was reduced from 300 feet in 2004. The developer should be required to
demonstrate under the FVA guidelines that there will be no more harm to the C-1
stream from placing half of a 44-unit townhouse development within the SWRPA
than there was from mowing the fields up to the C-1 stream. Further, the
permit that appears to allow an intrusion into the inner 150-foot buffer should
be re-evaluated.
Thank you for allowing our organization to comment, and thank you in advance
for whatever you can do to protect and restore the quality of the Hakihokake
Creek, one of
Sincerely,
Michael Keady
President
Cc: Mr. Vincent Jiovino
Attachment