We, the undersigned organizations, strongly urge you to veto S1368/A3008. This bill will severely weaken environmental protections in the state, accelerate sprawl and add more pollution into areas that are already suffering from the effects of too much pollution.

This bill was rushed through without proper public input and proper notice and is a case study in the abuse of democracy. The people of New Jersey and the communities most affected by the bill did not have time to fully understand this severely flawed piece of legislation, let alone provide meaningful input. The bill was written behind closed doors and passed before the broader public had a chance to be alerted to its content. This bill is not only bad policy, but it undermines key environmental initiatives of your administration.

From the cities, to the suburbs to the rural towns of New Jersey, an overwhelming majority of New Jersey residents support strong efforts to limit sprawl, overdevelopment and pollution in their communities. But S1368 will accelerate some of our state’s worst environmental problems in the places already most threatened by these problems.

Some of the many reasons why we urge a veto include:

1) 45-day timeline is simply too quick to ensure proper review of most permits covered under the bill. In addition, the idea that every permit requires the same review time, regardless of its scope, complexity, and potential impacts on communities is especially bad public policy. Among other faults, this timeline prevents effective public notice and participation, and thereby silences the public.

2) Automatic approval of permits when staff members have not been capable of providing a meaningful review under the timeline is both misguided and dangerous. This threatens public health and the environment, in some case irreversibly. If the agency fails to act quickly enough, even in cases of good faith, only the public will suffer.

3) The bill violates your own environmental justice executive order, and ensures that those communities that have been most burdened by pollution and contamination in the past will continue to bear that burden in the future, and with less opportunity to contest the projects creating that burden.

4) The bill will result in a surge of approvals of backlogged permits that the NJDEP and other agencies have not been sufficiently staffed up to review. The bill cannot provide adequate resources to ensure that the NJDEP can judiciously review all the backlogged permits on an expedited timeline. Further, NJDEP rules need updating to provide clearer guidance to permit reviewers, in order to deliver the certainty that the business community seeks.

5) Until rules are strengthened to set clear standards and protections for natural resources, bad permits will result from this bill. For example, the state is lurching from drought to drought in its failure to adequately manage its water supplies. That failure is based on years of inaction to update the rules governing state regulatory programs. While the water allocation program is one of the worst examples of outdated, ineffective programs, it is not the only one.

6) The bill attempts to assert the primacy of the State Plan in environmental and land use decision-making and fails to correct serious flaws in the Plan. In fact, the bill furthers exploits the flaws of the Plan by fast tracking building permits in Planning Areas 1 and 2, centers, UEZ zones, and redevelopment areas that will impact environmentally sensitive areas near C-1 streams, water supply intakes, wetlands, critical areas in the Pinelands and Highlands, and habitat for threatened and endangered species. Places affected include already overdeveloped towns like Old Bridge, East Windsor, Marlboro, Woolwich, Parsippany and all our wonderful shore towns.

7) The Legislature never intended the State Plan to be a regulatory document, but instead a planning tool. This bill overrides that intent. The bill fast-tracks permits in broad Planning Areas under the State Plan without requiring the kinds of planning activities envisioned by the State Plan, including a meaningful capacity analysis and the identification of protections needed to protect area natural resources.

8) Supposed safeguards to protect federal delegation and exempt “state and federal mandates” are legally suspect and ineffective regardless of their legal merit.

9) The lack of presumption of validity, third party standing and appeal are equally legally suspect and clearly undemocratic and anti-environment.

10) The permits by rule are accidents waiting to happen. Permitting polluters to pick and pay for their own private permit writers creates an insurmountable conflict of interest regardless of the level of oversight. Under this bill, the GEMS landfill would be automatically allowed to hook into the CCMUA and discharge toxic waste into Camden’s sewer system.

11) The bill weakens environmental protections and standards, including protections for waterways large and small including vernal ponds in so-called smart growth areas and allows sewer expansions without respect to water quality impacts.

12) This bill will prevent the NJDEP from fulfilling its responsibility to increase protections for the state’s water and natural resources from sprawl by giving a veto over DEP rulemaking to an official outside DEP. Further, every new and revised rule by every state agency, whether or not it has anything to do with development, would be subject to a veto by the new smart growth czar. For example, the czar could block proposed rules on prevailing wages, indoor air quality, prevention of potentially catastrophic chemical risks, apprenticeship training, or any other regulation.

13) The bill does not only apply to private developers, but to large government agencies whose projects generally entail significant environmental impacts. This means that agencies such as the NJ DOT, one of the largest contracting entities in New Jersey, or the NY/NJ Port Authority, may apply for expedited DEP permit review for a wide variety of large-scale roadway, ports, airport and other projects. Fast-tracking highway projects will certainly lead to more sprawl, less cohesive planning, and less community involvement.

14) The bill is likely both unconstitutional and in violation of federal law, and the lawsuits that will seek to block this bill’s implementation will introduce more uncertainty, not less, into the permitting process.

For years developers and builders have been transforming our hometowns into disconnected subdivisions surrounded by traffic-congested highways and strip malls. Yes indeed, we need smart growth in New Jersey. But S1368 as drafted will not lead to smart growth.

Instead, it will exacerbate sprawl in environmentally sensitive areas and lead to overdevelopment in many of our suburbs. Further, the bill would waive due process and circumvent environmental and public review of a wide range of permits, including those regulating some of the worst health threatening pollution, in urban areas and heavily populated suburbs already burdened with too much pollution.

Governor McGreevey, we urge you to veto this undemocratic, anti-environment bill which has been misnamed a bill for smart growth. The bill is no more a smart growth measure than President Bush’s ‘Clear Skies’ proposal is a clean air plan. Instead of a legacy of more pollution, sprawl and traffic, we need your leadership to protect our state’s open space and natural resources, for the health and quality of life of our children and our children’s children for generations to come.

Yours,