Water Works 13 - 3/24/03

The NJDEP Makes Time Stand Still

In Water Works 3, before the remarkable series of documents that followed, we left the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection increasing high-volume water mining at the headwaters of Lockatong Creek in a drought, four years ago. I left you on the steps of Franklin Town Hall then with the promise of a lively discussion with the NJDEP about that whole affair.

I apologize for keeping you waiting, constrained as we all are by 24 hour days – or I should say almost all. At its recent water allocation hearing at the Franklin Township School, the NJDEP seemed ready to apply its own peculiar magic to the earth’s rotation once it makes water disappear from Hunterdon County.

The state’s designs on our clocks and calendars were revealed when Hearing Officer Joseph Miri announced that public comment on the permit would close in 14 days, contrary to the “NOTICE OF PUBLIC HEARING” on my desk for the same permit, which says: “The Hearing Officer shall hold the hearing record open until 20 days after the public hearing to receive written comments relative to the application.” (i) It’s dated January 30, 2003, on a sheet bearing the New Jersey seal and NJDEP Commissioner Campbell’s name on the front, which should preempt any speculation that my copy came from some rogue outfit specializing in bogus public hearing notices.

After Mr. Miri’s appointment book sleight-of-hand elided both time and law before the crowd at the school, “relative to the application” in that hearing notice really began to bother me. It hinted we had more to worry about than a mislaid Elements of Style – that Albert Einstein and Harry Houdini might have replaced Strunk and White on state bookshelves. The only explanations for Mr. Miri’s stunt are: [1] that the entire state delegation to Franklin that night failed to notice the notice of public hearing for their own public hearing, or [2] that Miri’s “now you see it, now you don’t” act conjured the spirit of a notorious state legal notice from another time and another place – from Easton, Pennsylvania in fact, where it invited comments from the public there about a controversial water allocation in Franklin Township, New Jersey. (ii)

What better way for Miri and the NJDEP to make objections from those unable to attend the hearing magically vanish, postmarked too late for consideration, and to shave a week’s work from the responses of those who did attend? Remember, we are talking about questions of aquifers and bedrock geology that demand research. We are not guessing which shell hid the pea. Unless Miri and his team plead ignorance, it is inescapable that they intentionally led their audience to believe what Miri and his companions knew was wrong.

Which argues for explanation [2] above, but as anyone familiar with the NJDEP’s record here knows, whenever it behaves that way it invariably makes an equally persuasive case for the root causes of explanation [1].

Following the 1997 water diversion by Garden State Growers that I’ve told you about – when the NJDEP condoned serious violations of state regulations – when it could no longer ignore reports of more failed wells near Garden State in 1998, the NJDEP discovered that year’s illegal pumping event just as the growing season ended, though it knew all along that the wells it shut down in October had been drilled the previous May. (iii) Many of us here first learned then that back in 1996 the NJDEP actually admitted it had not examined Garden State’s daily water usage records for 10 years. (iv) It finally received 10 years of daily reports in a single week, after the 1997 incident. (v) But even those 1998 violations couldn’t shake the NJDEP’s confidence. A year later it increased Garden State’s water allocation by 60% during the drought of 1999.

Water Works 6 through 12 told the same story, all of it old news to the crowd that assembled at Franklin Town Hall in April of 1999 to demand explanations for what the state had done and what it planned to do. That was when we heard the unforgettable words of New Jersey Geologic Survey geologist Robert Canace, one of Mr. Miri’s team at the school hearing, who told us the NJDEP wasn’t bound by the standards of its Water Supply Master Plan, when confronted with evidence that the state knew our water had already been mined beyond safe standards when Garden State was cited for pumping without permits in 1998. (vi) The 60% increase was granted in July, 1999.

Now, armed with innovations of its own design, not only in theoretical physics but in geology and mathematics too, the NJDEP is back to take what the old math left behind.

Coming soon – Voodoo hydrogeology.

Ron Gutkowski