During the recent debate about the Highlands preservation legislation, the reason most often cited for the radical proposal was the need to protect the pristine quality of the region's waters.

As legislators on both sides of the issue debated, they focused on the reservoirs that supply Newark, Jersey City and other more populous areas. Millions of people drink the water from those reservoirs, said proponents. Why should people in the Highlands have to give up their property rights for water they don't even use, argued opponents.

But what both sides missed was the fact that land preservation also is needed to ensure the future of the region's ground water, which supplies most of Morris County.

"One of the big problems, especially in Morris County, is as you cut down the forests and pave over them and put down houses and lawns, you create a downward cycle of lowering the water table," said Jeff Tittel, head of the New Jersey Chapter of the Sierra Club and a proponent of the Highlands Water Protection and Planning Act.

"The more building there is, the less water goes into the ground and the more that is taken out."

There are indications of trouble ahead:

- A moratorium on new hookups to the township water system in Roxbury has been in effect since 2002 because the township is under court order to provide water to three pending developments and has none to spare. It has a contract to draw an additional 350,000 gallons of water a year from the Morris County Municipal Utilities Authority but can't because the state Department of Environmental Protection is not letting the MCMUA take more water from its wells.

- To back up its wells, which fell to critically low levels during the drought of 2001 and 2002, the MCMUA in December contracted for the design of a $7.5 million pipeline to transfer 7 million gallons a day from the Jersey City Reservoir in Boonton and Parsippany. Montville already buys some of Jersey City's water.

- Parsippany, meanwhile, has enacted permanent water conservation measures and is seeking to purchase some water from Jersey City, as well, because during summer months it has on several occasions exceeded the amount of water that it is allowed by the DEP to draw from its wells.

Environmentalist say such problems have been caused by development, and that ground water supplies will only be depleted further if building is allowed to continue.

"I've seen cases where a subdivision has gone in and people living below it have had to dig deeper wells because of the drop in the water table," said Tittel.

The Morris County freeholders are concerned enough that they have commissioned a water capacity study for the county.

"The county MUA is not going to be developing any new above-ground reservoirs, and we're about 95 percent dependent on ground water," said Walter Krich, the county's planning director.

Overall, the Highlands supplies almost 400 million gallons of drinking water a day to people living inside the region and outside it.

The March report by Gov. James E. McGreevey's Highlands Task Force wrote that water is the most important reason for preserving the region: "The Highlands are first and foremost a significant source of drinking water for the state, both for residents in the area and for hundreds of thousands of residents outside the region. The majority of the state's reservoirs are located in the Highlands."

The most quoted statistic about water is that more than half of the state's residents drink Highlands water. Water gets from the Highlands to communities outside it through a complex system of water transfers via pipelines.

That figure may be understated, according to a report released in April by the state DEP and the New Jersey Geological Survey. The Potable Water Supplied in 1999 by New Jersey's Highlands report found that Highlands water - reservoirs, ground water and downstream surface water supplies from runoff - was distributed to 292 municipalities, which are home to 64 percent of the state's population, in 16 of New Jersey's 21 counties. A little more than a third of all the potable water used in the state in 1999 - or about 148 billion gallons - came from the Highlands.

"The special characteristics of the Highlands allow it to provide abundant, high quality waters to the citizens of New Jersey," wrote authors Jeffrey L. Hoffman and Steven E. Domber.

"As such, it is an important source of potable water."

A quarter of the state's population - mostly in the Northeast but also in Lincoln Park - gets its water through the North Jersey District Water Supply Commission from the 30 billion gallon Wanaque and 7 billion gallon Monksville reservoirs in Passaic County. Newark gets some of its water from the North Jersey District and the rest from six Pequannock reservoirs, including Oak Ridge and Charlottesburg in Morris, which total more than 14 billion gallons. And Jersey City's water comes from the Split Rock and Boonton reservoirs, which together hold 11.3 billion gallons, in Morris.

Some of these reservoirs are more than a century old, dating to the days when Morris County and the region to the north were little more than woods and streams. Cities such as Newark began to look to the Pequannock River for water back in the 1880s.

The Passaic River, from which Newark and Jersey City had been drawing water, was heavily polluted by factories that flourished during the Industrial Revolution, and by sewer system discharges. Scientists began studying the pollution's potential effects on health and learned that it caused serious illnesses, including typhoid fever.

"The Passaic River, at Belleville, from which the supplies for Newark and Jersey City are now pumped, is disgustingly impure, and is constantly liable to dangerous contamination," wrote Professor George H. Cook in the Annual Report of the State Geologist of New Jersey for 1886.

"With sources of supply unquestioned in purity, and more abundant than those used for the supply of Boston, New York, or Philadelphia, and at a manageable expense, there is no justifiable excuse for longer delay in the introduction of this element so essential for health, comfort and cleanliness."

The 60-foot high dam creating the Oak Ridge Reservoir and water pipeline system for Newark was completed in 1892 for about $6 million.

Twelve years later, the Boonton Reservoir Dam and aqueduct that provide water to Jersey City were completed. At 2,100 feet long and 115 feet high, it was the second-largest dam in the world when it was built.

Other reservoirs were built, mostly in the north and west - although Spruce Run and Round Valley, the state's largest at 55 billion gallons, were constructed more recently in the 1960s in Hunterdon to supply Central Jersey with water. The reservoirs remained clean and the land around them remained empty.

Today's Highlands water still is relatively clean, particularly when compared with that in the rest of the state.

A 1999 sampling of aquatic communities by the DEP found 67 percent of sites in the Highlands to be good and 33 percent to be impaired - though only 1 percent of those were considered severely impaired. Among those Highlands waters deemed impaired were the Whippany, Rockaway and upper Pequannock rivers. Throughout the rest of New Jersey, about 67 percent of water sites were impaired.

While there likely were many causes of impairment, the Highlands Task Force Report says that studies have shown that "the percentage of urban land within a watershed in conjunction with the amount of upstream wastewater discharges correlates to the rate of impaired rivers in a watershed."

One thing that has helped to keep the water clean has been a 16-year prohibition on developing watershed land.

As the development boom pushed up and out in the 1980s, forests were being bulldozed and the prices that developers were paying for land proved tempting to cities facing budget gaps, such as Newark. So the state in 1988 enacted a law prohibiting the sale of watershed land until permanent protections could be enacted. Since no such protections were passed, the moratorium has remained in effect and would become permanent under the Highlands bill.

Beginning in the 1997 fiscal year, the state budgeted $2 million to compensate municipalities with watershed land - including Rockaway Township, Jefferson and Kinnelon - for the loss of tax revenues on their watershed property, which was devalued as a result of the moratorium. In the 2000 fiscal year, after which legislation formalizing a moratorium aid program was enacted, $3.4 million were paid at a rate of $68.50 per acre for more than 49,000 watershed acres.

Two years later, the state budget eliminated the aid program. The Highlands legislation would bring back watershed aid, at a lower rate of $47 per acre.

In arguing for passage of the bill on the floor of the lower house earlier this month, Assemblyman John McKeon, D-Essex, characterized the bill as ensuring "no less than the quality of life and vitality of the state of New Jersey." If the Highlands is not preserved, state water supply officials estimated that in 50 years it would cost $30 billion to treat the water.

In response, Assemblyman Michael Doherty, R-Warren, contended that the strict regulations that the bill would bring are unnecessary because the ground is "amazingly proficient" at cleaning water.

"We actually used to train in digging ditches and putting ponchos over that ditch and then urinating around the ditch. Believe it or not, but the time it went through a foot of dirt, that water was clean again for drinking," said Doherty, referring to his Army training, as others in the chamber gasped or chuckled.

McKeon shot back: "The very nature of this bill is to avoid us drinking that styled water."

Yet Doherty maintained that the legislation is not about water.

"I believe it is about control over northwest New Jersey and who is going to exercise it," he said.

"It's merely a total power grab, a slap in the face of constitutional government."

But to Diane Nelson of Boonton Township, such talk is ridiculous. She can't believe that it took New Jersey this long to pass Highlands protection legislation, considering the efforts that neighboring New York State has made to preserve the Adirondack and Catskill mountain areas.

"It just didn't make any sense that New Jersey, being the most populous state, wasn't doing something to protect the water supply," she said.

"We are also helping ourselves. Our water supply is from the ground. You just don't have water if you cover the land over."

There is evidence that the ground water supply here is declining, according to the U.S. Geological Survey's well monitoring program. Long range data is available for only one of the USGS's two monitoring wells in Morris. According to that data, at a 120-foot deep well at Green Pond in Rockaway Township, the highest water level recorded was in 1983 and has declined steadily ever since (monitoring began in 1981). Last year's high measurement was about half a foot lower than in 1983.

Parsippany is facing a number of water problems.

In December, 2002, the Parsippany Environmental Advisory Committee urged the township to declare a development moratorium until it could solve its water problems.

The state did mandate a moratorium on new connections to the township's water system because it has exceeded its state-allotted usage on several occasions. On average, Parsippany pumps 6.5 million gallons of water a day from its wells to homes and businesses and is allowed to withdraw 280 million gallons a month from its wells.

In April, the council considered again buying as much as 18 million gallons of water a year from the Jersey City reservoir to use in emergency situations in the summer time. Mayor Mimi Letts has approved permanent summer water restrictions mandating lawn watering only on alternate days to try to prevent the township from exceeding its state-mandated limit.

The MCMUA wants to bolster its water supply with Jersey City water as well. A contractor is working on a pipeline design for a future transfer. The MUA currently pumps as much as 186 million gallons a month from its eight wells in two well fields - Alamatong in Randolph and Flanders Valley in Mount Olive. It supplies some of the water to Parsippany, seven other communities and the New Jersey American Water Company and Southeast Morris County MUA.

"The problem in the Highlands is that recharge is very slow because of the rocky ground," said Tittel.

The fact that Morris communities are facing their own water problems and now are threatened with a potential loss of property tax income from land in the preservation area has some calling for the imposition of a water tax.

This fee, which would be assessed on water taken from Highlands reservoirs and used by Jersey City, Newark and other communities, could help make up for lost property tax revenues, compensate owners who could no longer develop their land or pay to buy and preserve property.

"I like the idea of a water usage fee," said Krich. "I think water is a little too cheap."

Some communities in other states have instituted water taxes, but the money usually has gone toward balancing budgets. In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed increasing water costs to pay to get more water into drier areas of the state and to save endangered fish.

Kurt Alstede, who owns farmland in Chester and Washington townships, said a water tax could help to fund the Highlands legislation, which contains only $10.2 million in aid to municipalities and no additional money for preserving farms or private forests.

"Since this entire bill has been proposed to ensure adequate and pure, clean water supplies for the cities, then those end users should be paying for it," he said. "It's not a radical or new concept."

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Colleen O'Dea can be reached at codea@gannett.com or (973) 428-6655.

Copyright 2004 Daily Record.