James M O'Neill

Staff Writer

A century-long battle over water in the region is heating up again with a proposal in New York to buy up to 5 million gallons of water a day from North Jersey’s largest reservoir.

The water company Suez says it needs more water to serve residents of Rockland County, and the agency that operates the Wanaque Reservoir says it is open to selling water across state lines.

But New Jersey conservationists and others say the move would be disastrous for North Jersey, potentially hampering both future development and water quality, and that the region’s current drought only reinforces their point.

“New Jersey is going to need every drop it has,” said Julia Somers, executive director of the New Jersey Highlands Coalition. “It would be reckless selling it to anyone else.”

Elliott Ruga, the advocacy group’s senior policy analyst, agreed. “Water in New Jersey is owned by the people and held in trust for them by the state,” he said.

The North Jersey District Water Supply Commission, the agency that operates the Wanaque Reservoir, counters that it would only sell water not currently dedicated to its customers. The revenue from selling water to New York would help keep water rates from rising in North Jersey, officials added.

“We have 6 million extra gallons a day, and we’d be willing to sell that water to whatever party is appropriate,” said William Maer, a spokesman for the commission. “It would be a potential extra source of revenue, but it’s a hypothetical discussion right now.”

Ruga said the state has a poor understanding of its own current and future water needs because the state’s Water Master Plan, which by law must be updated every five years with new information, has not been updated in two decades.

Related: Long history of NY-NJ water battles

Selling the water to New York would likely generate stiff resistance from some New Jersey officials. “I’m sure there would be concerns raised about moving New Jersey stream flow into New York,” said Daniel Van Abs, a Rutgers University professor who used to oversee statewide water resource management at the Department of Environmental Protection.

“We’ve finally turned the corner and some of our urban areas are growing again, so water demand will grow, and I’m sure these cities will want to reserve the water for their own use,” Van Abs said.

Maer said the DEP, which would need to approve any agreement, would ensure “the best long-term interests of the municipalities that the agency serves. The DEP and the agency won’t compromise water supplies for the municipalities that rely on North Jersey District.”

The proposal to import water from North Jersey was part of a series of suggestions to increase water supply for the Rockland system in a report Suez submitted to New York’s Public Service Commission. After a controversial plan by Suez to build a $150 million desalination plant on the Hudson River was scrapped, the commission asked the company to find new sources of drinking water that would add 3 million gallons a day.

Related: NY water proposals could impact NJ supply

Suez spokesman Rich Henning said the report is now under review by the New York commission. “This is a futures plan, not a plan that has any movement on it yet, and will be based on the commission’s decision as to what we go forward with,” Henning said.

The Wanaque Reservoir is a key source of drinking water for 3.5 million residents of northern New Jersey. The state’s water resources are considered “public assets,” and the DEP is authorized to protect, manage and allocate use of the water for current and future needs.

Bob Considine, a DEP spokesman, said that before it approves any export of water outside New Jersey, the agency would first need to ensure that the participating systems had sufficient capacity and that exporting the water “would not impair service to their normal customers.”

The Wanaque Reservoir water would be transported through an existing pipeline to the Oradell Reservoir on the Hackensack River, operated by Suez’s New Jersey subsidiary. It would be treated there and then sent north to a pump station on the New Jersey-New York border near Lake Tappan, called the Blaisdell Interconnection, where it would be transferred into the Rockland system.

The infrastructure, already in place, would need several million dollars' worth of improvements, according to the report produced for Suez by CDM Smith, a consulting and engineering firm.

From an engineering perspective, the proposal “is not a bad idea,” said Howard J. Woods Jr., a private consultant to water utilities and former water company executive. “The systems abut one another, and there’s not much to build.”

But he expects there would be political resistance. “These are two water systems with the unfortunate problem of having a state line run between them,” Woods said. “The transfer of water is technically easy, but when doing it from one political jurisdiction to another you can run into a lot of regulatory problems.”

North Jersey drinking water is supplied through two independent but interconnected systems. One is a series of three reservoirs along the Hackensack River — the Oradell, Woodcliff Lake and Lake Tappan reservoirs — operated by the Bergen County subsidiary of Suez, which serves more than 800,000 people in Bergen and Hudson counties.

The other is the Wanaque Reservoir system, operated by North Jersey District. It serves people in 100 communities, from Alpine to Wayne and Bayonne to Newark. It also sends water over to the Oradell Reservoir in the Suez system.

The Wanaque system includes the 30-billion-gallon Wanaque Reservoir, created by damming the Wanaque River; the smaller, backup Monksville Reservoir and several pumping stations, including one on the Pompton River where it joins the Passaic River in Wayne. The pump stations can take water out of the rivers and send it back up into the Wanaque Reservoir to replenish it.

Suez is part-owner of the pump station on the Pompton, and can tap into what gets pumped out of the river there.

The Rockland division of Suez, meanwhile, operates its own reservoir on the upper Hackensack, called Lake DeForest. Rules are in place to make sure that reservoir continues to release enough water down the Hackensack to keep the Bergen reservoirs full.

Three years ago, at the request of both North Jersey District and Suez, the DEP, in a controversial move, increased the Wanaque system’s safe yield — the amount that can safely be taken from the system each day — by 17 million gallons, to 190 million gallons. That gave North Jersey District a surplus that could potentially be sold.

When pushing for the increase in what could safely be taken out of the Wanaque system, water officials from North Jersey District and Suez said the move would keep the Wanaque Reservoir and the Suez Hackensack system at safe levels during peak demand periods and reduce the need for water rationing. There was no mention at the time from either entity that the water would be used as anything other than a buffer for northern New Jersey — let alone sold out of state.

Among those who had fought the DEP’s decision to increase the Wanaque’s safe yield was the Passaic Valley Water Commission, which supplies drinking water to Paterson, Passaic, Clifton and other towns. It had been leery of letting the other utilities take more water out of the Pompton because its own main intake is downstream, on the Passaic River at Little Falls.

North Jersey District and Suez are required by DEP permits to ensure a sufficient flow along the Passaic River below the Wayne pump station to maintain river quality for aquatic life and also to make sure enough flow reaches the main intake for Passaic Valley.

Because of the drought, the Wanaque and Monksville reservoirs combined are currently hovering at about 48 percent of capacity. Historically at this time of year they have rebounded from summer lows to nearly 70 percent of capacity.

Even with this sort of drought, the Wanaque could, at least theoretically, supply enough water to meet current customer needs and provide a surplus that could be sold to Rockland, experts say. Safe yield is based on stringent conditions — not only taking into account the worst drought ever recorded in the region, in 2001-02, but also assuming that no water conservation would occur, Van Abs said. Since the state would demand conservation in a drought emergency, “there’s a real buffer built in” to the DEP calculations, he said.

Still, it’s not known if the 2001-02 drought is the worst we’ll ever see, water experts caution, especially given the more dramatic shifts in weather patterns that could be caused by climate change.

Email: oneillj@northjersey.com; Twitter: @JamesMONeill1