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The Highlands Region of Northern New Jersey is an 800,000-acre area covering approximately 1,200 square miles and made up of 88 municipalities in seven counties. The Region is an essential source of drinking water for over 5.4 million New Jersey residents.
The New Jersey Highlands Water Protection and Planning Council (Highlands Council) is a regional planning agency that works in partnership with municipalities and counties in the Highlands Region to help those communities take a proactive and regional approach to watershed protection.
Historically, private lake associations and municipalities have worked autonomously to address water quality issues and develop improvement plans. Working together, however, and taking a regional approach to lake and watershed management has much farther-reaching benefits. Taking an integrated approach helps improve water quality and reduce incidents of aquatic invasive species and harmful algal blooms (HABs) not just in one waterbody, but throughout an entire region of lakes and streams.
The Highlands Council was created as part of the New Jersey Highlands Water Protection and Planning Act (the Highlands Act), which was signed into law in 2004. It has funded numerous water-quality-related planning grants throughout the region.
Today, we’re excited to announce that the Township of Byram in Sussex County, New Jersey, is the latest municipality to receive Highlands Council grant approval for a Lake and Watershed Management Program for ten of the Township’s waterbodies. The Township chose to engage the services of Princeton Hydro to support the project work. Princeton Hydro also assisted the Township in pursuing the Highlands Council grant opportunity and securing the grant funding.
“Byram Township, the Township of Lakes, is excited to have received the grant funding from the Highlands Council providing the opportunity to develop a Lake and Watershed Management Plan with the goal of improving water quality within the Township’s watersheds,” said Joseph Sabatini, Township Manager. “Having an adopted plan will open the door to opportunities to grant funding to implement the recommend improvements.”
Located 55 miles from New York City, the Township of Byram has a population of about 8,000. It is locally known as “The Township of Lakes” because the community has two dozen or more lakes and ponds within its borders, an area of about 22.7 square miles.
The Township chose to engage the services of Princeton Hydro to assist in designing a scope of work for a municipal-wide holistic watershed management plan that identifies and prioritizes watershed management techniques and measures that are best suited for immediate and long-term implementation.
Given the large number of waterbodies in the area, and in an effort to keep the first phase of the Highlands Council funded Lake and Watershed Management Program to a reasonable scope, a selection process occurred with input from the Township offices, the Township Environmental Commission, Princeton Hydro and ultimately, the Highlands Council.
Specifically, the grant guidelines are “to establish tiers of lake management appropriate to management strategies that help protect lake water quality and community value from the impacts of present and future development,” and lake management programs are instructed to focus efforts on lakes that are greater than ten acres in size.
The ten waterbodies included in the Township of Byram’s Lake and Watershed Management Program are: Cranberry Lake, Lake Lackawanna, Johnson Lake, Forest Lake, Panther Lake, Wolf Lake, Wright Pond, Jefferson Lake, Stag Pond, and Kofferls Pond.
For the first phase of the Lake and Watershed Management Program, Princeton Hydro will conduct a number of analyses, including watershed modeling; hydrologic and pollutant loading analysis; watershed-based and in-lake water quality assessments; and tropic state assessments.
The assessment aims to:
Once all the lab data is processed, the watershed modeling is complete, and historical data reviewed, Princeton Hydro will create a General Assessment Report that will summarize the data/observations and identify which watershed management techniques and measures are best suited for immediate or long-term implementation.
“We’re thrilled to be partnered with Bryam on this important initiative to bring together under one holistic management plan in one form or another ten private and public lakes throughout the township,” said Princeton Hydro’s Senior Manager, Christopher Mikolajczyk, a Certified Lake Manager and lead designer for this initiative. “Byram is the fourth Highlands based Township I have worked with to take this regional approach, which will continue to make a significant impact in managing stormwater, improving water quality, and mitigating HABs throughout the Highlands region of New Jersey.”
This regional approach to lake management has been implemented by Princeton Hydro in other New Jersey Highland communities. In 2019, the Borough of Ringwood became the first municipality in the state of New Jersey to take a regional approach to private lake management through a public-private partnership with four lake associations within six lakes.
Ringwood ultimately became a model for similar Highlands Council grants within the region, including West Milford Township, for which the Highlands Council approved funding in 2020 to support a watershed assessment of 22 private and public lakes. Rockaway Township in Morris County also received Highlands Council grant approval in 2021 to complete a Lake Management Planning Study for 11 lakes. Princeton Hydro authored the scopes of work for these projects.
To learn more about Princeton Hydro’s natural resource management services, click here. And, click here to learn more about Highlands Council and available grant funding.
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