Water Works 59 - 6/14/05

The Art of Shooting Yourself in the Foot

I doubt that Water Works will ever be mistaken for journalism, and since this series moves too slowly to qualify as a blog, as you must know by now the odds of finding timely news or opinions here are incredibly slim. I’m a stickler on that point. I have too much respect for the work of real journalists to behave any other way. So it was quite a shock to learn, only days after our last episode appeared, how close I had come to committing timeliness.

If the impacts of land use on New Jersey’s water supplies concern you at all, unless you have been living in complete seclusion for a full year you can’t have missed the fuss the Hunterdon freeholders have kicked up over the Highlands Act. Their main complaint is that the strict rules imposed to protect Highlands watersheds violate New Jersey’s traditions of home rule – the rights of towns to control land use within town borders.

Throughout the controversy over the Highlands here, the editorial page of our local newspaper of record, the Hunterdon County Democrat, has not said much. That’s not surprising. Anything it did say would not have differed much from the news, which in every newspaper in the state has consisted largely of reports of people’s highly speculative opinions about the impacts the Highlands rules might or might not have. There was little else to report. In Hunterdon the opinionating has been especially fierce. Under the circumstances, it seems reasonable that the Democrat might take its time before it voiced an opinion about all sorts of other opinions about what might or might not happen here someday.

In the same week when you last heard from Water Works, the Democrat finally jumped into the argument and went straight to the heart of the affair. It asked the same question I had planned to ask next – whether home rule can protect endangered watersheds as effectively as regional solutions like the Highlands Act. Here is some of what it had to say:

“Highlands opponents ask: Isn’t it a government power grab, threatening home rule? Proponents nod to New Jersey’s belief in home rule, but they say the state also has a 35-year tradition of recognizing special areas that need protection beyond what local governments can provide. Consider the Pinelands, the Meadowlands, the Jersey shore and the D&R Canal.”

“Home rule is fine, they say. But even in a community with an aggressive preservation program like Chester Township, in Morris County, it isn’t enough. So says Mayor Ben Spinelli, who is also a Highlands Council member. His township has preserved more than 7,650 acres, 42% of the township. Yet all the good his municipality has done along the Black River could be compromised by a neighboring municipality doing nothing, or allowing more building, he says.”

“Look across the state ... how well has home rule saved New Jersey’s natural resources elsewhere?” (i)

If what you have to say is, it’s unbelievable that we’re still asking questions as obvious as that one, this late in the game – you probably don’t live in Hunterdon County. You may find us hard to understand.

Unless you are familiar with life in small towns you may find Hunterdon impossible to understand. An average-sized town in northern New Jersey has about 17,000 residents. In Hunterdon County, the 24 towns that make up 71% of our total population have an average of only 3,600 residents. Consequently, land use issues tend to be handled differently here. A crowd protesting some change in a local ordinance at a public meeting is one thing. It is something else to answer a knock on your door and find your neighbor’s brother-in-law there, preparing to mount a protest in your kitchen.

Such things happen here more often than you think. They shape the way we think and the way our freeholders think. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is a popular approach to planning in small towns like ours, and we dislike outsiders telling us what we should do. So much as a suggestion from one Hunterdon town to another on a land use issue is rare, but aside from a few exceptions (58), together we seem to have blundered our way to success. After 25 years of intense pressure to grow, most of Hunterdon is still one of the least populated places in New Jersey. As of the last census, 70% of the county’s land area had an average population density of only 164 people per square mile, just 10% of the average density in the northern half of the state.

But home rule only deserves some of the credit for that. Other factors slowed growth here more than towns could have on their own, like the delayed completion of Interstate 78. The state’s building boom of the 1980s had already peaked by the time the county’s most heavily traveled highway was finished. That delayed a lot of plans to develop Hunterdon. The real estate crash that followed that speculative bubble lasted well into the 1990s. It was only after the crash, as markets for land and new homes began to recover, that many towns here began down-zoning, by setting maximum population densities land can support without harming water supplies.

Controls on growth imposed individually by towns in the past 10 to 15 years have undoubtedly had impacts. In the least-populated 70% of the county, the average amount of land required to build a new home has certainly doubled. But given the conservative cast of politics in our towns, we should ask if that zoning provides as much protection for our water as studies of the land’s carrying capacity dictate, or if it provides less. I would not hesitate to bet on the answer. In 1997, when Franklin Township established the largest minimum lot size the county had ever seen, our 7-acre zoning could easily have been 11 acres or even twice as large. What was scientifically justified and legally defensible was simply not politically feasible.

In that Democrat editorial I cited, Chester Township’s Mayor Spinelli pointed out the biggest limitation of reliance on home rule to protect watersheds. Streams usually cross several towns in their course. What one town does, another town can undo, and any town can make all the efforts of its neighbors pointless by refusing to cooperate.

Nevertheless, the Hunterdon freeholders have not opposed the Highlands Act merely because it violates New Jersey’s traditions of home rule. The stance they have emphatically taken is – the only source of drinking water that several million people will ever have is better protected by home rule than any other means. They have never said how that will happen. The answer to a simple question will help you gauge the risk that stance entails. When was the last time you saw a housing development, a shopping center or an office park converted back to farms, meadows or woods?

In other words, if we act the way our freeholders say we should, and it turns out we made a mistake, there will be no undoing any damage we inflict.

By now you may be asking how an idea with so little to be said for it stayed front and center on our public agenda for more than a year. If so, you don’t understand the politics of rural towns and counties. In places where most of the land is farmed, farmers wield influence all out of proportion to their numbers on questions of land use, for a good reason. Anyone involved in the public life of those towns in any way has more than a passing acquaintance with a few farmers.

Most people in New Jersey don’t. It’s hard to fully appreciate the most volatile issue raised by the new Highlands rules unless you do. I personally doubt the new rules will ultimately have as much impact on land values and farmers’ equity as some think and I expect the data will ultimately prove me right, but unfortunately we will all have to wait several months to find out. Any attempt to make sense of that situation would be pointless until the shock inflicted on Highlands land markets finally subsides.

When you take more than 600 square miles of land and down-zone it twice in 10 months, as the Highlands rules have, “devaluation” barely hints at the impact on land values in the short run. Only fools think land markets move as quickly as financial markets do. Bigger fools pretended to tell us what land in the Highlands was worth while we all waited for last summer’s interim rules to be replaced by the newer and stricter rules that were issued last month, as scheduled. What sensible people rightly expected is like the old joke about a dead cat. What’s it worth? It’s priceless, because you can’t put a value on it. Only a fool would try.

The new regulations were no joke to farmers in the Highlands, who had more to worry about than the collateral impacts of a massive down-zoning and a chorus of fools. They had to keep farming, which meant running low-margin businesses with most of their capital tied up in the value of their land. After 10 months of uncertainty and a growing season, they may only have to wait several more months and another growing season before they know what those businesses are really worth. Unless they preferred to cash out, which predictably most did not, they were left to cope on their own. You would have to be pretty cold-blooded not to sympathize.

There were plenty of other causes for concern. Constraints that the Highlands Act put on commercial development and local control over property taxes made it especially unpopular with town governments. Restrictions imposed overnight by legislative fiat on towns used to managing their business more methodically were widely resented. Regulating land use in an area as large as the Highlands meant standardized state rules in places where local ordinances have been traditionally crafted with obsessive attention to detail. Towns situated outside the scope of the new rules had cause for complaint too, including areas as important to New Jersey’s water supplies as the Highlands. We were left to cope with the overflow of people who would be moving to our watersheds (Map) instead of those the state chose to protect.

Despite the serious reservations many people had about what the state was doing, support from our town governments for the freeholders’ campaign against the Highlands Act was lukewarm at best. The freeholders lobbied intensely to get the towns to join them, but the governing bodies of most towns declined the invitation. Undeterred by a lack of interest from the very people whose interests they claimed to be defending, the freeholders forged ahead.

At this point you must be wondering why, instead of focusing on the issues that worried the towns most, our freeholders hitched those concerns to a notion not likely to win much support – their contention that home rule was a more effective way to protect watersheds than the Highlands Act. You may also be wondering why they weren’t told a long time ago to defend that position once and for all or stop peddling nonsense.

People who know more about these matters than I do tell me the freeholders had no need of endorsements from the towns as long as they had the support of core political constituencies, conservative Republicans who oppose land use regulation as a general principle and a lot of understandably angry farmers. Both groups resent state regulations with an intensity that must be seen to be believed. The scale of the new Highlands regulations inspired rhetoric not normally heard in public forums here. The specter of “communism” started popping up so often in local news stories last year that I began collecting them. It quieted down eventually, though I ran across a fellow citing Lenin to a reporter as recently as this spring.

The answer to the second question is simple. The freeholders saw no need to show the rest of us that they had a better way to protect our water. To them the advantages of home rule were articles of faith that required no proof. It took a while before they realized not everyone agreed. Though their original intent was an outright repeal of the Highlands Act, with no viable alternative they obviously had no chance of success. It seemed to take them a while to notice that too. By the time that Hunterdon Democrat editorial reminded them that we had been waiting nearly a year to see their alternative plan, they were already talking about “amendments” and “improvements” to the Highlands Act instead of repeal.

In short, our freeholders barked and no one blinked. Last month they finally had their day in court, so to speak. Their new and far less ambitious agenda made their long-awaited confrontation with the Highlands Council a predictably underwhelming affair. And perhaps more predictably by now, they have once again left the rest of us waiting to see a plan.

My purpose in dragging you through all this is not to pick on our freeholders. They do seem to be learning – however slowly – and they haven’t inflicted any damage, so I really have no grounds to object to anything they’ve done. In fact, in most other respects they do their job very well.

I do have an objection to the way they think. Their infatuation with home rule is a forgivable mistake, but a bigger mistake they made is not. Water protection ranked so low among their priorities that it never received more than rhetorical support. They obviously don’t grasp the importance water should have to any elected official anywhere in New Jersey. It should always rank first. In a state facing the possible depletion of its water supplies, that is a fundamental requirement for responsible leadership in this 21st century. Rhetoric is no substitute and ignorance is no excuse.

Our freeholders are not the only public officials in the state who suffer from a chronic blind spot concerning water. You must have observed the same condition yourself, elsewhere and often enough to convince you there is nothing peculiar about Hunterdon County. Even our state government isn’t immune. (50) Others may suffer less publicly than we do in Hunterdon, but we hardly suffer alone, so we should not judge the freeholders too harshly.

If not for that blind spot, they could have done us all a great favor, and perhaps they still can. Few people in New Jersey speak as eloquently as some of our freeholders do about the many good things to be said for small towns and rural living. That list of the virtues of home rule that I still owe you (58) could easily be cribbed from things I’ve heard them say. The Highlands regulations will be a work in progress for some time to come. All the time, money and expertise they invested in their ill-fated quest to topple the Highlands Act can still be put to good use.

A happy ending is about the only thing rarer than breaking news here at Water Works, so any other lessons to be drawn from today’s case study will wait until I return. When I do, I will tell you tales of blind spots so incredible, even people who live in New Jersey will find them hard to believe.

Ron Gutkowski