The article below is from the 24 October 2007 Asbury Park Press; Tom Baldwin is the reporter. Looks like the New Jersey water folks did not have 20-20 vision.
Governor Bill Richardson (D-NM) had it wrong - the West will need to send water to the East.
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New Jersey Drinking Water Running Out
Supplies won't meet projected needs by 2020
TRENTON — New Jersey officials heard sobering news Tuesday that the state is running out of drinking water, but environmentalists said the bigger problem is the government is not doing anything about it.
"This is not a problem we have in the future. This is a problem we have today," said Joseph Maraziti, a former chairman of the State Planning Commission, addressing the state Clean Water Council's annual public hearing.
"We have a gross underinvestment in infrastructure," Maraziti said, noting the crisis might strike by 2020, not long after today's first-graders graduate from high school.
Fletcher Platt, executive vice president of the Millburn-based engineering consulting firm Hatch Mott MacDonald, said New Jersey's nearly 8.8 million residents will swell in numbers by a million by 2020.
"We do have 100-year-old water-distribution systems," Platt said, noting water supplies are inadequate to meet projected needs.
Platt foresees faster population growth in New Jersey than the Census Bureau, which projects the state will have nearly 9.5 million residents in 2020. It wouldn't reach 9.8 million residents until 2030, under those 2005 federal projections.
Others at Tuesday's hearing also voiced concern about the water infrastructure.
"We've been drunk with water," said Ben Spinelli, executive director of the State Planning Commission, saying the biggest problem is neglect.
"We are probably going to be the first state in the nation to reach build-out . . . The infrastructure that is in the ground has started to reach the end of its useful age," Spinelli said.
Sheila Frace from the federal Environmental Protection Agency said the politics of water, common in parched Western states, is moving east.
"Where we have been is not going to get us to where we are going," Frace said, noting climate change is an added dimension to the demand-supply problem.
Water, said Cranbury Mayor David Stout, has been the foundation of all civilizations.
As if they were symbols of the problem, plastic-wrapped cases of bottled water rested on a table at one side of the room, though participants could have sated their thirsts at the drinking fountains out in the hall.
Environmentalists such as Jeff Tittel of the Sierra Club, coupled with David Pringle of the New Jersey Environmental Federation, said they have heard these forecasts with annual regularity, but they see no action by Trenton.
"It's the same message year in and year out," said Pringle. "Nothing changes. Are they going to get it this time? Our water supply is getting increasingly polluted, and the state doesn't have the policies in place to address that."
"The state actually has policies that undermine clean water," said Tittel, such as spending $250 million in tax dollars to build a golf course on the Meadowlands instead of fixing Paterson's piping so rain-driven sewage does not spill into nearby streams.
Tittel said monitors on rivers show that pollution has moved 10 miles west, upstream in east-flowing streams, such as the Metedeconk, and 10 miles east, upstream on west-flowing rivers that empty into the Delaware River.
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"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others." -- African proverb
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