Environmental advocates suggest a model ordinance that would allow local sales of only slow-release, "bay friendly" lawn fertilizers could be one way to immediately start reducing nutrient pollution to Barnegat Bay, N.J.
Advocacy groups and the state Department of Environmental Protection have discussed how to set limits on nutrients, called total maximum daily loads, or TMDLs, but state regulators say those limits can't be justified under current state regulations, said William deCamp Jr., president of the group Save Barnegat Bay, during the final session Friday of a "state of the bay" conference at Georgian Court University.
"To get a TMDL is tough because we don't have the dissolved oxygen problem" that nutrient over-enrichment causes in other estuaries, deCamp said.
But activists have found a state "county environmental health" law that allows counties to regulate contaminants, and that could be the authority behind a new ordinance regulating fertilizer use, deCamp suggested at a joint meeting with representatives from the Ocean County Mayors' Association.
The group heard a presentation from Suffolk County, N.Y., officials about a new fertilizer ordinance there that takes effect Jan. 1. Among other management measures, it prohibits most fertilizer applications between Nov. 1 and April 1, five months when heavy precipitation tends to move dissolved nitrates into ground water, said Carrie Meek Gallagher, commissioner of Suffolk's Department of Environment and Energy.
"We drink our ground water in eastern Long Island. We don't have any other source. Frankly, that's how we were able to get a fertilizer ordinance," Gallagher said. Nitrate levels in ground water increased between 38 percent and 67 percent in wells since 1987 and now about 10 percent of Suffolk wells exceed recommended limits for nitrates, she said.
Still, "this was not easy to do," Gallagher added. Fertilizer makers and the landscaping industry were especially resistant, she said, but now landscapers will take classes in turf management to help them minimize fertilizer needs.
Assemblyman Daniel M. Van Pelt, R-Ocean, said Ocean County's delegation in the Statehouse is calling for joint hearings in the Legislature to review priorities for restoring Barnegat Bay water quality. Estuary program supporters think $1.5 million to $2 million a year is needed to support an "annual science monitoring agenda" for a bay that supports about $3.5 billion a year in economic activity, said Stan Hales, the estuary program director.
"We're not even spending 1 percent to protect a bay that sustains an entire economy," said Hales, who this week wrote to state environmental Commissioner Lisa Jackson making a case for supporting a new anti-pollution push.
Scientists at this week's conference said Barnegat Bay is slipping into the kind of ecological emergencies that plague Chesapeake Bay, where nutrient over-enrichment fuels algae blooms, sucks oxygen out of bay waters and destroys sea grass beds.
Algae blooms and eelgrass losses occurred in Barnegat Bay again this past summer, when Little Egg Harbor at the southern end of the estuary had very little eelgrass growth before mid-summer, said Michael Kennish, a research scientist with Rutgers University.