From the Record:
Water tax can’t tap legislative support
One sure way of protecting the state’s water-generating Highlands land is to buy it, but state funding sources are running dry.
And that has led to renewed calls for a water-user fee to pay for land acquisitions envisioned in the yet-to-be-completed Highlands regional master plan.
“It’s one thing that everybody who has spoken at Highlands Council hearings seems to agree on,” Highlands Council Chairman John Weingart said recently.
“Farmers, environmentalists, other speakers — in this region, it seems to be a very popular way to deal with” the issue of how to pay for open space buyouts.
The tax would apply to everyone in the state who uses water from a public supply.
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Yet legislative supporters of establishing a user fee on millions of homes and businesses are treading water in Trenton.The regional master plan is being designed to severely curb large development in the seven-county mountain region stretching from the New York border in Mahwah into Hunterdon County. The region supplies water to more than half the state.
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Assemblyman John McKeon, D-Essex, a sponsor of a bill that would create a statewide water-user fee to fund water-utility upgrades and land purchases in the Highlands, said legislative leaders have higher priorities at the moment.“Everything is kind of fluid now,” McKeon said, “as we do interim funding on the Garden State Preservation Trust,” which is expected to run dry this year. That trust funds the Green Acres and Farmland Preservation programs.
McKeon said he expects a bond referendum for about $200 million will get approved for November’s ballot.
Others, however, see the impending drought in open-space funding as an opportunity to set a water-user fee.
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McKeon said the water user fee is not off the table. But, he recalled, it died in legislative discussions last year because many legislators saw it as a new tax.“There was no appetite for an additional tax. The votes weren’t there,” McKeon said.