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State Plan Summary
Guide to the State Plan
State Plan Summary
In 1985, the New Jersey State Legislature adopted the State Planning Act. The Act created a State Planning Commission to be comprised of seventeen members appointed by the Governor. The Act also created an Office of State Planning to serve as the professional staff to the Commission.
The State Planning Act affirmed that the State of New Jersey needed sound and integrated "Statewide planning" in order to "conserve its natural resources, revitalize its urban centers, protect the quality of its environment, and provide needed housing and adequate public services at a reasonable cost while promoting beneficial economic growth, development and renewal."
In 1992 the Commission adopted the first State Development and Redevelopment Plan, otherwise known as the State Plan.
The Plan's intent is to manage and shape new growth and encourage development in urban areas and compact centers. By channeling growth the Plan, if fully implemented, will save hundreds of millions of tax dollars in infrastructure and operating costs and tens of thousands of acres of open space. However, local governments and state agencies have been slow in integrating the Plan into their policies and regulations.
The Commission is periodically required to update the State Development and Redevelopment Plan through the "cross-acceptance" process. The suggested revised Plan has been sent to all counties and forwarded to all municipalities to compare and negotiate policies and strategies with the Commission.
There are 566 municipalities in New Jersey that implement their own local planning and zoning regulations. The "cross-acceptance" process will begin with the Plan undergoing public discussions in all 21 counties sponsored by the Commission. There are some cases where municipalities will hold local meetings to discuss the Plan.
Guide to the State Plan
(abridged from New Jersey Future's Guide to the State Plan, www.njfuture.org/HTMLSrc/stateplan.html)
Overview
The Problem
Following a recession in the early nineteen eighties, New Jersey began to enjoy a period of tremendous economic growth, development and prosperity. Along with the benefits came the visible effects of growth, such as suburban sprawl, development occupying and consuming the countryside, the phenomenal surge of suburban traffic and people and jobs fleeing our cities. Many of these same problems are the result of thoughtless and uncoordinated growth and development - growth that is not only contrary to common sense and to a healthy, natural environment, but to our pocketbooks and wallets, as well.
The urban areas and cities of New Jersey are faced with a decaying urban infrastructure system, dis-investment by government and private industry, crime, a deteriorating educational system, and dwindling employment opportunities. Both jobs and people continue to flee from our cities - many of those who run are in search of those same employment opportunities that were once available there. Economic life has spread outward to the suburbs as has housing and commerce. In many cases, shopping, working and living in town centers has been replaced by sterile strip malls and shopping centers.
These same suburbs are faced with tremendous traffic problems, pollution, high taxes, expensive housing as well as the feeling that a sense of "community" is being lost under a sea of pavement. At the same time, formerly rural areas with environmentally valuable resources have become the homes of the most mobile new jobs and job holders. Often, residents in rural areas feel almost powerless to deal with vast new developments "pop up" developments sweeping over their towns and redefining their way of life.
Even though many areas in New Jersey face different problems, the common link is unplanned and uncoordinated development -- or suburban sprawl. Growth is taking place in a way that does not seem to make sense -- in areas without schools, without mass transit, without existing sewers, and without taking our environment and precious natural resources into consideration. Unplanned growth costs more than traditional development, and all of us bear the staggering costs of financing this sprawl. Sprawl snatches our tax dollars and spreads them out across a landscape that craves more and more to maintain the new places we just built.
If development continues as it has, New Jersey may end up as a sea of highways, strip malls, urban blight and pollution. Unless we, as citizens, act to plan the future of our state, New Jersey will complete its transformation into the "strip mall state" or the "toxic state," or perhaps, most aptly, "the suburban sprawl state."
Although land use planning was traditionally a municipal responsibility, it became clear that there was an urgent need for a system that would consider the cumulative impacts of development on the State of New Jersey as a whole. After years of debate throughout the State, in 1985, Governor Tom Kean signed the State Planning Act into law. With this law, the citizens of New Jersey were given a powerful new tool with which to take control of their lives and the future of their state -- and the challenge to save New Jersey began.
The Vision
The first State Development and Redevelopment Plan was adopted in June of 1992. Establishing a vision and a plan for the future of New Jersey, its intent is to manage and shape new growth and encourage redevelopment in ways that will revive our cities, preserve our environment, our open spaces as well as our natural resources, provide affordable housing, make sense out the State's increasing traffic congestion and create communities in which New Jerseyans can live, work and play. And, at the same time, its goals is to save hundreds of millions of dollars in tax dollars by channeling growth to established urban areas and compact centers.
The vision, as described in the Plan, was to be accomplished through a unique process of consensus throughout the State called cross-acceptance. This would ensure the participation of public officials, planners, farmers, environmentalists, housing advocates and other interested citizens on the local, county, regional and state levels in defining how New Jersey would look and grow. It is essentially a vivid example of democracy in action. The vision of the Plan is to create well-designed communities, towns and real neighborhoods in which we would all like to live, work, "play" and send our children to school. Future growth would take place in cities and town centers that already have roads, sewer systems, schools, bus or train services, shops, restaurants, recreational facilities, etc. New growth would be directed to away from our few remaining farms, forests and environmentally sensitive areas. There would be a choice of reasonably and affordably priced housing -- single-family homes, town houses, higher density apartments and condominiums, as well as a variety of job opportunities and cultural and recreational activities. The present trend of vacating our older cities and urban areas and developing more and more of our countryside would be reversed.
New Jersey would be made up of diverse, compact communities which nurture, respect and preserve their open lands and natural resources. And they would be places in which the vast number of New Jerseyan would prefer to live.
The Plan
Essentially, the State Plan draws a map of New Jersey and divides the state into five planning areas. Each of these planning areas has existing similar geographic characteristics (e.g, environmentally sensitive lands and natural resources, population densities, certain wastewater and sewer systems, existing transportation networks, farmlands, etc.). New growth and development is guided into these planning areas in ways that make sense -- ways that take the existing characteristics into consideration.
The State Planning Act establishes goals and statewide policies for New Jersey in areas such as housing, the environment, economic growth, natural resources and open space, the provision of public services, and statewide planning. These goals are accomplished through certain policy objectives which deal with types of housing, transportation, parks, recreation and open spaces, etc. for each planning area. If you build houses in areas with lots of existing houses, roads, sewers, schools and jobs -- the residents will spend less time traveling to work and less time in cars (which pollute the air). Present trends of abandoning our cities and developing sprawl in our rural areas would be reversed.
The goals of the State Plan are also accomplished by guiding new growth and redevelopment into compact areas -- or centers. The Plan defines centers, or areas of compact growth, as the best way to direct and organize new growth and redevelopment in the State. Each planning area has different types of centers. Growth is directed into areas which make sense and which would result in or support communities in which New Jerseyans could live, work and play.
The State Development and Redevelopment Plan is created through a statewide planning process called cross-acceptance, which ensures that governments at all levels, as well as stakeholders and the public, participate in deciding the future of their State. The State Plan is not a regulation, but a policy guide to coordinate the planning and decision-making of State, regional and local agencies.