Using a River Basin Management Approach to Keep Clean Water Clean – Potential Application to Passaic River Basin system

Benjamin Witherell (1) and Huan Feng

Department of Earth and Environmental Studies, Montclair State University, One Normal Avenue,

Montclair, NJ 07043; (973) 655-4448 (1) benwitherell@yahoo.com

One of the current challenges for water resource managers world-wide is how to maintain water quality from being degraded under the increasing pressure of urbanization, population growth and economic development.  This can be especially challenging in basins like the Passaic River in New Jersey, which are interstate (NJ/NY) and large enough to encompass many counties and municipalities.  Many states in the U.S., including New Jersey, have laws and regulations requiring antidegradation policies to be implemented for some or all of their surface waters and less so ground waters.  New Jersey has a formal antidegradation policy and provides a designation of Category One (C1) for surface waters deemed to have “exceptional” value.  Currently, there is no coordinated basin-wide water resource management approach for the interstate Passaic River.  In this preliminary study, we investigated potential benefits for the Passaic River basin from an approach similar to the Delaware River Basin Commission’s Special Protection Waters regulations.  We will discuss how economies of scale and scope may result from a river basin management approach in the Passaic River basin and how the results might benefit current goals and activities, such as antidegradation of the watershed, water quality trading, total maximum daily loads (TMDLs), flood control, and cleanup of the Lower Passaic River and New York-New Jersey Harbor.

The work is supported in part by the McMullen-Blake Fellowship (BW) and MSU SBR Award and Sokol Faculty Fellow Award (HF).