GREAT SWAMP WATERSHED ASSOCIATION

Fall 2000
Vol. 20 No. 4

Reflections on 1999-2000: Accomplishments and Challenges

By Julia M. Somers, Executive Director

Though annual report narratives often try, it's not easy to summarize a year's work in a single word or phrase.  For the Great Swamp Watershed Association, the 1999-2000 year was alternately exciting and frustrating: a time of satisfying consolidation for some programs; a period of planning for promising, ambitious projects that are growing out of work we have completed; a time, too, when hoped-for results - defeat of a questionable development proposal, funding for a desirable program, completion of an existing project - just didn't occur.  On balance, however, the needle is well in the "positive" range.  A few examples:

Among our most significant 1999-2000 accomplishments was the work that led up to this past summer's acquisition of an 18-acre piece of ecologically important property located very near our existing 23-acre Conservation Area on Tiger Lily Lane in Harding Township.   Purchased from the estate of John C. Case, the property includes extensive wetlands as well as a developable upland area, mature forest, and a section of Silver Brook that crosses our Conservation Area just upstream.  Both Harding Township and the Harding Land Trust served as valuable advisors to us in the acquisition process, and together the three groups now own well over 100 acres of property and easements along Silver Brook.

Another achievement with which we are pleased is the publication of a "Teacher's Guide to the Great Swamp Watershed."   Designed to support and supplement environmental curricula taught in area schools, the Guide will be given to all teachers who complete the Wetlands Education for Teachers (WET) program that we facilitate. This is a national program offered in our region by the Watershed Association. To date, nearly 60 local teachers have completed this Project WET certification, and they will also receive a copy of this new Guide.  We're also offering it to other teachers through local news media and Across the Watershed.

Earlier this year, the Ten Towns Great Swamp Watershed Management Committee recognized the many GSWA Stream Team volunteers for their efforts.    These members have worked diligently over the past year to collect stream base-flow information, "first flush" event water samples, water quality samples, macroinvertebrate samples, and rain data for the five streams of the watershed.  The work has been done under the guidance of Ten Towns' watershed management consultant Dr. Francis X. Browne and Watershed Association trustee Dr. Leland Pollock.  Our BATs (Biological Assessment Teams) and CATs (Chemical Assessment Teams) are well established, and our RATs (River Assessment Teams) are no longer just a dream.

Also, in support of Ten Towns' model ordinances, we have begun a project to develop three brochures that explain, in non-technical terms, the value of protecting trees, limiting development on steep slopes, and ensuring "no net increase in stormwater volumes or pollutant loadings" when new development occurs.  Watch for more on this in 2001.

Promoting environmentally sound stormwater management techniques, we created a "Blue- Green Technologies" slide presentation and showed it at four conferences during the year.   While the slide show is aimed at professionals with some knowledge of stormwater management, a video for lay audiences is also in production; it will show how stormwater management determines the ecological value and beauty of our landscapes. A handbook for engineers and others will be completed soon as well.

Much time was also spent during the year preparing a "streamways brochure," which lays out the benefits to streamside property-owners who choose to confer some measure of protection - permanent or otherwise - to their lands.  The benefits include tax relief, property value enhancement and aesthetic enhancement, for example.  For the environment, streamside protection preserves and extends animal habitats, filters stormwater runoff, and protects against stream-bank erosion and downstream sedimentation. The brochure will be released later this year, when we expect to begin actively asking these targeted landowners to help create streamways - contiguous ribbons of protected land - along the Upper Passaic River and Primrose Brook.

Analyzing Growth Trends

The Great Swamp watershed build-out analysis continues, dramatically illustrating the form and pattern that development can be expected to follow under the continuation of current growth trends and zoning regulations.  Completed are zoning-based analyses for Harding, Morris and Long Hill Townships, to whose boards or municipal staffs we have made detailed presentations.   In addition, our findings have been presented at three state or regional conferences.   Analyses for other watershed municipalities should be complete by next March.  The information produced is particularly helpful to municipal planning boards and professional planners as they consider how many additional houses, residents, vehicles, schools and other infrastructure their towns would have to absorb, as well as the environmental impacts that will occur, if all developable land were indeed developed.  Such information may also raise awareness of the need to make adjustments within a community's Master Plan.

Finally, I want to highlight the work of our diligent Swamp Watchers, whose reports on local "hot spots" (environmentally questionable development projects) you see in our quarterly newsletter. Their efforts are great, as is the advocacy work undertaken by the Association over the past year in most watershed communities. Throughout the watershed, where appropriate, Watershed Association personnel, volunteers or trustees have attended meetings on local issues that may have threatened community character or watershed environment.

Challenges Ahead

We have presented expert testimony from planners, environmental engineers and lawyers, and are proud to have been able to contribute to changing the final resolution of applications being considered by local planning boards or boards of adjustment in a substantial number of cases.

On a somewhat less than positive environmental note:  While residents of the Greater New York metropolitan area are the beneficiaries of a strong regional and national economy, the downside is a raging tide of development throughout the region, accompanied by a proposed weakening of important state environmental protection regulations, that threaten to undo much of what so many have worked so hard to protect over the years.  The great challenges to environmental preservation, in the Great Swamp watershed and beyond, have become inertia, complacency and a comfort level with a business-as-usual approach to residential and commercial development.  The response - the only response - to this challenge is eternal, informed vigilance.

***

Whom to thank for making our work possible?  First our wonderful staff, board, committees and volunteers.   New staff (Jan Malay) and board members (Chris Allyn, Larry Chase and Lee Pollock) have joined us; volunteers have become active on committees; mayors, municipal board chairs and members have gone out of their way to be helpful; environmental professionals and planners have been generous in offering us the benefit of their expertise.

We must also, of course, express our gratitude to those who support us financially: corporations, foundations, members and other individual donors.  We honor and thank all of these in but a small way by publishing their names in this report.   Please take a moment, glance through the lists, and join me in offering thanks to all who have helped us in 1999-2000.

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