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Asbury Park Press - Massive Jackson Project Seen as Threat to River
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Massive Jackson Project Seen as Threat to River
Published in the Asbury Park Press 3/02/04
By KIRK MOORE
STAFF WRITER
JACKSON -- The exit ramp from I-195 leads to Cedar Swamp Road, and the name says it all: homes interspersed with dark, wet woods broken by occasional pastures and planked horse fences.
Hundreds of feet back in the woods, small feeder streams run to the upper Metedeconk River.
Water washes past the roots of cedar trees back in the swamp and flows east toward Barnegat Bay. Some water is intercepted 10 miles downstream, at the intake of the Brick Township Municipal Utilities Authority water plant, which sends the water to household faucets in Brick, Point Pleasant and Point Pleasant Beach.
So when neighbors Allison Smith and Steven Brosky talk about a developer's big plans for stores and other commercial buildings on 300-plus acres around their homes, they contend it will endanger the water supply for people downstream.
"We're all realists," said Smith, a co-founder of the local group Save, Preserve and Respect Our Environment (SPARE). "We realize development has to happen. But it has to be done without harming people down the road.
"Cutting down pristine pinelands to put up a retail mecca is not the way to do it."
Commercial development, and the property tax revenue it can generate, holds an undeniable attraction for Jackson. Municipal officials are already trying to reduce home building -- not only to keep open space, but to hold down surging costs for schools and town services that came with a 28 percent population growth during the past decade.
Planning for commercial development off I-195 was "approved 25 years ago, when the eastern half of town wasn't built yet," Brosky said. "Now we're backed up to the water. You can't build on it.
"You're going to pave under clean water for a T-shirt stand? It doesn't make any sense."
Category 1 for river
The stakes were raised when Gov. McGreevey last year announced a Category 1 designation for the Metedeconk River, meaning the state Department of Environmental Protection would do everything it could to prevent additional pollution from degrading the river's water quality. That includes a prohibition on building within 300 feet of the stream.
"We support Category 1," said Mayor Sean G. Giblin, who with other town officials wants the DEP to grant leeway in enforcing buffer areas. "We support saving the environment. We have a proven track record. All we're asking for is a relief mechanism.
"With commercial areas, I'm not going to be on septic, I'll be using sewer lines. I'm not going to send a lot of water over the buffer to that stream," Giblin said, speaking in the voice of an imaginary business owner. "Can't I manage it by properly handling storm water, by reducing impermeable ground cover?"
Brick Mayor Joseph C. Scarpelli said he understands Giblin's problem.
"My pressure is to keep the river clean," Scarpelli said. "Their pressure is to keep a balance with ratables. I understand as a public official the jam that Jackson's in."
If -- as Giblin hopes -- the DEP can ensure ways to prevent pollution with smaller stream buffers, Scarpelli said, "I would support that, if they can come up with a compromise that will help Jackson and still protect the water."
An $855 million plan
The state's Category 1 buffer could slap 600-foot-wide swaths through developer Mitch Leigh's vision of his Jackson Towne Centre in the Jackson Mills section.
Real estate is a second career for Leigh, a New York City composer best known for his score in "Man of La Mancha," the 1965 musical based on the stories of Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes and his char-acter Don Quixote.
Leigh's overall $855 million res-idential, commercial and recre-ational project near I-195 and Route 527 proposed up to 5,400 single-family houses, town houses, and housing for senior citizens and low- to moderate-income families.
Since 1989, Leigh has had pre-liminary approval for 1,641 homes. That approval will ex-pire March 14.
The Towne Centre has been controversial for years, and now a variant of that plan -- a "Jackson Common" commercial area with up to 39 buildings between I-195 and West Com-modore Boulevard -- could force municipal and state offi-cials into balancing economic development with regional wa-ter supply.
Leigh Realty hasn't completed filing a development applica-tion, according to Jackson planning and zoning officials. An environmental impact state-ment compiled by consultants for Leigh proposes to handle storm water runoff with onsite retention basins.
The DEP has provided Leigh with only two letters of inter-pretation -- documents that state the location, extent and natural resource value of wet-lands on the property, said Elaine Makatura, a spokes-woman for the agency.
Such letters "are usually the precursor to development ap-plications," Makatura said.
The Jackson Common site lies outside coastal and Pinelands areas where the DEP would have a great deal of land-use authority. But Leigh would still have to deal with DEP reviews, depending on what kind of building he decides to pursue, she said.
"If we do regulate, they must be in compliance with the new storm water rules," Makatura said. "And in the C-1 designated area, that means they would need the 300-foot buffers."
The Category 1 designation set off a flurry of map-reading at the Jackson town hall.
"We're still in the process of analyzing where our buffers are," Giblin said. "We're not sure what areas will be includ-ed -- whether it's just the main stream, or all the little, spider-webby streams, too."
The process also inspired a spate of acerbic comment in local newspapers, from resi-dents who note that Brick and other towns that use river wa-ter are not saddled with the economic costs of protecting it with stream buffers.
"The rules were adopted after we built out," Scarpelli said. "Unfortunately, we're devel-oped. We're already maxed out."
A plan to protect river
State Environmental Commissioner Bradley M. Campbell has stressed that New Jersey has to stop building in river headwaters. But he's also said that Category 1 protections for the entire Metedeconk will be a problem because so much of the river watershed in such towns as Howell, Lakewood and Brick was developed long before there were environmental standards.
Last month, a report jointly sponsored by the Brick Munici-pal Utilities Authority and the nonprofit Trust for Public Land laid out the beginnings of a plan to protect the river's wa-ter quality.
Preserving land along stream banks -- particularly in the upper reaches of Jackson, Free-hold and Millstone townships -- is advocated. SPARE members say the report bolsters their arguments against allowing large-scale development in Jackson Mills.
"It should be managed as a re-gional resource," said Denise Garner of SPARE.
With the property-tax situa-tion, Garner said, Jackson offi-cials "are looking at the fact that we're in an explosive stage of development. There are thousands of homes on the (permit) books. But in 10 years it will be done, and there will be no bringing the trees and all the soils back to do the filtration.
"Jackson Township has 25 per-cent of the watershed, which is substantial compared to the other towns," Garner said.
To protect the river, she said, Jackson needs help from the state and other river towns -- not just with land conserva-tion, but in dealing with the "ratables chase" that pressures local officials to allow more de-velopment in hopes of easing property taxes.
"That's uncharted territory," Scarpelli said. "I think the state is the only one that can deal with that."
In October several Cedar Swamp Road neighbors -- Allison Smith, Steven Brosky, Garner and Lori Neuman -- formed SPARE. Since then the group has grown to about 150 mem-bers, including people from other parts of Jackson and neighboring towns, and made networking connections with regional and state environmen-tal groups, Garner said.
SPARE members use the Inter-net for a lot of their work, with www.orgsites.com/nj/spare-jackson serving as a Web site.
Smith said Jackson officials "have done very positive things in our town. They've preserved open space and tried to control residential development. But they're gung-ho for commercial development, and I don't know if that's right for our town."
As a mother, Smith said, she worries most about the region's water supply staying safe for such children as her son Chris-tian, 2.
"I feel it's my obligation to protect his drinking water, and the drinking water for the children and men and women down-stream," she said.
Kirk Moore: (732) 557-5728
