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There are many opportunities for regional planning in New Jersey. Below are a few examples of places where regional planning could work.
The Highlands
County Planning
Multi-Municipal Planning
The Highlands
The Highlands region, which is divided between two states, 12 counties, and 108 municipalities, has been recognized as a "Special Resource Area" in the NJ State Development and Redevelopment Plan, and as "nationally significant" by the USDA Forest Service in their 1992 and ongoing studies of the region, and is acknowledged as supplying drinking water to over half the residents of New Jersey. State and federal agencies and analyses have documented the region's critical resources and the threats facing them, primarily from the effects of suburban sprawl. Priority conservation areas have been identified that need to be protected in order to safeguard New Jersey's water supply, critical wildlife habitat, contiguous forests, productive farmland and key recreational areas.
The State of New Jersey, counties and municipalities have made significant investments to protect open space in the Highlands. The federal government has also provided support and is poised to do more through the recently introduced Highlands Stewardship Act. However, there is a growing recognition within the conservation community and within state and local governments that land acquisition alone will be insufficient to protect the critical lands and resources of the Highlands and to focus and manage growth in appropriate areas within resource constraints. Because of this, there is a great recognition of the need to coordinate all levels of government to identify appropriate land-use planning and regulatory tools to protect the Highlands.
Time is of the essence. A recent U.S. Forest Service's study of the Highlands region found that over 5,000 acres of land were developed a year in the NY-NJ Highlands between 1995 and 2000. The rate of forest and wetland loss quadrupled from a rate of 830 acres a year between 1984 and 1995, to 3,400 acres a year between 1995 and 2000. An additional 1,600 acres of farmland a year was lost between 1995 and 2000. Furthermore, a 48% projected increase in population under current zoning and land use laws will likely cause further conversion of productive agriculture and forestlands, threatening critical forested watersheds and water supplies. Twenty Highlands' municipalities experienced greater than 20% population growth between 1990 and 2000. If current trends continue, ground water withdrawals are expected to exceed local supply in a number of the Highlands' watersheds, including the Ramapo, Whippanny, Pequest, Upper Delaware, and Lopatcong. The Rockaways and Upper Musconetcong basins could also experience similar shortages. The number of watersheds in the Highlands likely to have exceptional water quality (less than 10% impervious cover) would be reduced more than 75%.
Highlands CoalitionCounty Planning
www.highlandscoalition.org/
Regional Action Plans
While the "home rule" tradition is strong in New Jersey, there is also a growing recognition that an effective way to make smart growth most effective is to empower New Jersey's counties to implement the Governor's smart growth agenda. Smart growth can be difficult to implement statewide when each of the state's 566 municipalities zones as it pleases. Recently, the Central Jersey Transportation Forum proposed a possible solution: "Regional Action Plans" that would give counties the authority to enforce and monitor planning activity by the towns within their borders. Under the proposal, municipalities would work with counties and the state to devise a Regional Action Plan for each of the state's 21 counties, to be implemented and modified in tandem with the State Plan. Timed growth ordinances, transfer of development rights, tax sharing, and vehicle trip-reduction ordinances would be among the tools municipalities could use to work together under the proposal. To promote compliance by municipalities, counties and the state would "aggressively" employ incentives and disincentives such as legal shields for potentially litigious zoning changes, streamlined permitting processes in designated growth areas and restricting permits in conservation areas.
Hunterdon CountyMulti-Municipal Planning
www.co.hunterdon.nj.us/smartgrowth.htm The Hunterdon County Planning Board was recently awarded a Smart Growth Grant from the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs. Smart Growth Planning Grants are awarded to municipalities or counties undertaking plans that advance the goals of the State Plan. The County is using the funding to replace its 1986 Growth Management Plan with a new "Strategic Growth Management Plan." This Plan is meant to be a guide for county planning policies, especially regarding transportation, open space, and farmland preservation. It is also meant to be a resource guide for Hunterdon County's municipalities to use when they prepare their Master Plans.
The Plan contains, among other things:
- A county-wide build-out analysis
- County-wide goals and strategies
- An implementation agenda, goals, and targets
- Funding for municipalities for GIS maps, design planning assistance, build-out technology, and data
Multi-municipal planning allows neighboring municipalities to develop a shared vision and to coordinate on various planning issues, including growth management, infrastructure provisions, preservation of natural and historic resources and economic development. Multi-municipal planning can encourage economic development by reducing the competition between towns for tax revenues, it can strengthen existing communities by focusing development on existing centers, it can preserve farmland and natural resources, and it can save money by sharing services. It can also help municipalities receive funding from state agencies, address issues that cross municipal boundaries and reinforce the importance of local planning.
In the document, "Municipal Implementation Tool #3: Multi-Municipal Planning," The Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (www.dvrpc.org) highlights the following planning tools & techniques that can be used in multi-municipal planning (some of the text below is excerpted/revised from this document; the full document can be found at www.dvrpc.org/planning/MCDtools/4.pdf):
- The Multi-Municipal Plan & Planning Area. Municipalities can get started by adopting a resolution authorizing their participating in a multi-municipal planning process. They should decide what their goals are, and then hire a planning consultant to help develop the plan. These specific plans can provide detailed strategies for development that supersede zoning and other land use regulations, and can speed up development approvals. Determining the planning area works best when the towns involved decide on priority areas that each participating government has in common and what activities will benefit them the most. The planning area could be any number of things, including: Existing configurations of political jurisdictions - city or borough and surrounding townships or a school district that already shares a tax base in the region; a natural resource- based area such as a watershed; a corridor or an area surrounding a proposed highway expansion, interchange or network; an area motivated to preserve viable farmland and/or aquifer recharge capacity by focusing growth in boroughs and villages; an area comprised of municipalities that have more commercial and industrial development and municipalities that are more residential, where services can be shared and benefit both.
- Joint Purchasing Programs. These are agreements between towns that allow municipalities to benefit from certain economies of scale in either their purchases or services. For instance, if two neighboring boroughs are paying for private trash pickup, it may be costing millions of dollars from each borough's budget each fiscal year. With joint purchasing agreements, these boroughs could purchase private trash pickup together and pay less.
- Joint Zoning. A joint zoning ordinance is the primary tool for implementing the multi-municipal plan. If separate zoning ordinances remain, each of the participating municipalities should work together to ensure consistency with the multi-municipal comprehensive plan.
- Transfer of Development Rights ("TDR"). TDR is a land preservation tool based on the principle that the right to develop land can be transferred to another property. TDR can also be implemented regionally, across jurisdictions. New Jersey's first successful use of TDR was in the Pinelands. A 1984 Appellate Division decision stuck down an East Windsor ordinance that provided for a complex, fully realized municipal TDR program, as not authorized under the Municipal Land Use Law. Subsequently, the State Agriculture Development Committee took the lead in writing a new TDR bill that, with many embellishments, was eventually adopted as the Burlington County Transfer of Development Rights Demonstration Act, effectively limiting TDR to that county. A 1993 statute (c339, PL 1993) established a TDR bank, capitalized at $20 million - but its use, according to an Attorney General's decision (October 21, 1997) has been limited to Burlington, the only county with municipalities expressly authorized to have TDR ordinances. A limited form of TDR - a provision for clustering on noncontiguous lots - was written into the Municipal Land Use Law (MLUL) in 1997. In March 2003, Governor McGreevey asked the Legislature to approve an amendment to the MLUL that would allow any municipality to use TDR.
- Tax Revenue & Service Sharing. When done between the governments in the planning area, this tool can allow municipalities that conserve sensitive land still benefit from nearby commercial or industrial development. If towns in New Jersey could do this, it would be an extremely useful tool. However, at this time, it only exists in the Pinelands and in the Hackensack Meadowlands.
Legal Basis for Multi-Municipal Planning
The Municipal Land Use Law allow for two or more municipalities to enter into an agreement for joint administration (including a regional planning board, a regional board of adjustment, or other joint officials), planning, or zoning. A regional planning board prepares a master plan for the development of the region, including elements such as open space, housing, etc. The State Plan also encourages multi-municipal planning, and special priority is given to joint municipal plans when the State awards Smart Growth Planning Grants (www.nj.gov/dca/osg/resources/grants.html).