- improper implementation of New Jersey’s stormwater program at the municipal level; and
- a failure by the State to oversee the program and to protect against local abuses, and damaged application of the law to development projects.
- Of the 12 projects we present in the review, projects complied with the law a pidly average of 42% of the time.
- When it came to using the nonstructural strategies so important to the NJ regs, compliance averaged an even worse 13%.
- Likewise the report found troubling results in the state’s efforts to identify and respond to these dramatic shortcomings.
The result of the failures of local municipalities and the DEP to ensure full and fair compliance with the state stormwater program is:
- increasing flooding for communities like Hamilton Twp and downstream communities like Trenton;
- increasing costs for communities in the form of emergency flood response, including police services and public works departments;
- polluting and eroding streams in a way that undermines infrastructure, infects drinking water, damages businesses and jobs, damages recreation and associated ecotourism, reduces property values, and threatens health and safety of communities.
- Reduces the volume of runoff, filters pollution and prevents erosion.
- At the same time buffers can increase the value of nearby homes by 6 to 15%.
- "Pennypack Park in Philadelphia is credited with a 38% increase in the value of a nearby property." Forested buffers generate tax revenues for host communities – in fact, in the United States trees planted on private properties have generated over $1.5 billion in tax revenue.
Protecting and restoring tree cover -- has saved some New Jersey communities billions of dollars in infrastructure that would otherwise be needed to manage stormwater runoff:
- Protecting existing tree cover was found to have prevented 65 million cubic feet of stormwater runoff in the Big Timber Creek watershed here in New Jersey saving communities $3.3 billion in stormwater infrastructure.
- In the Mill Creek watershed also in New Jersey, protecting existing tree cover prevented 6.7 million cubic feet of stormwater runoff saving the community $350 million in stormwater infrastructure.