Water Supply in Danger

For several years, our group of concerned citizens has been attempting to get officials from the local level up to the Governor's office to subject this project to the same environmental oversight any other project of its size would undergo. We compiled technical data to back up concerns that the faulty design of the wastewater treatment system would lead to Fecal Coliform Bacteria entering our water supply in amounts unacceptable to the NJDEP.

Despite concerns expressed by hundreds of citizens, The Monmouth County Commissioners passed a precedent setting site-specific amendment to the Monmouth County Water Quality Management Plan allowing the developer to apply for one of the last permits needed to proceed with the project, a NJPDES-DGW permit. The permit issued by the NJDEP was detailed in the rejection of residents' concerns expressed at public hearings and other venues. This was not acceptable to us, so we subsequently hired a hydrologist to do the proper testing to validate our technical data. THE INDEPENDENT HYDROLOGY REPORT CONFIRMS OUR CONCERNS AND VALIDATES OUR TECHNICAL DATA.

Here is a summary of the report:

Permitting approval for the Colts Neck Manor development was based on
presentations of developer's "self-certified" engineering personnel, who
misrepresented site conditions in the material they submitted to the NJDEP. As
a result, modeling on which the permits were based does not reflect actual soil
conditions nor demonstrate that their proposed onsite wastewater treatment
system will work as designed.

• TRC confirmed concerns about major flaws in the permitting process which
allowed incomplete and misleading information as the basis for granting the
developer's wastewater discharge permit by the NJDEP.

• TRC concluded that semi-impervious cemented sands and iron ore (locally
known as ironstone) in subsurface soils at the site, would present significant
obstacles to proper operation of the wastewater treatment system disposal
fields - causing wastewater discharge to travel horizontally and likely surface (a
process known as daylighting) above the adjacent Yellow Brook waterway
rather than percolate to aquifer levels as intended.

• TRC also confirmed that the system would not remove all fecal coliform or
Contaminants of Emerging Concern (CECs) such as PFAS ("forever" chemical
compounds) and 1,4-dioxane, a common household chemical contaminant.

• Most alarmingly, TRC confirmed that in a system failure, the operator of the
onsite wastewater treatment system would have less than a day to restore the
system to operation or risk a major overflow of raw sewage on slopes above
Yellow Brook.

You should be concerned. Please join our voices in stopping this development from proceeding any further. What can you do? You can call every press outlet you know of and ask them to pick up this story. You can contact your legislators and tell them about the conclusions in the report. Tell them that we require them to do everything in their power to see to it that our water supply is not contaminated by this ill-conceived project. Also, you can bring it to the attention of every single politician that wants your vote in November!