New Jersey farmers whose fruit crops were damaged or destroyed by an unexpected four-day freeze last spring could apply for grants to help them recover their losses under new legislation that would earmark $60 million in state funding for such relief.
The late-April cold snap zapped peach, apple, pear, cherry, and other early-blooming trees, as well as shrub, vine, and ground crops like blueberries, strawberries, and grapes at farms both statewide and throughout the eastern U.S. from Virginia to Michigan. Many growers lost 30% or more of their fruit crops, with some reporting total losses. Officials estimated damages in New Jersey would top $300 million.
Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia (R., Sussex) applauded the state and federal response, with both Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture making statewide disaster declarations that cleared the way for farmers to apply for emergency loans and other relief assistance.
But in the weeks afterward, farmers called for direct financial aid, with many saying the freeze was the most catastrophic of their lifetimes. So Fantasia recently introduced a bill that would allocate $60 million for grants impacted farmers could apply for, with priority given to those hardest hit. The bill would require the state agriculture secretary to report within a year how the money was spent and advise if more aid is needed.
Seven Republicans signed on to co-sponsor the bill. Sen. Parker Space (R., Sussex), who’s also a farmer by trade, will sponsor the bill in the upper chamber, Fantasia said.
Fantasia said $60 million in aid for farmers is far from the controversial budget add-ons that annually bloat the state budget and make GOP legislators howl in protest.
This year, state budget appropriations critics deride as “pork” included $500,000 for pickleball courts and millions for other “really beautiful things that are absolutely wants and not needs,” Fantasia said. Farm relief “is not a want. It’s a need,” she added.
Farming has a sprawling footprint in New Jersey, she said. Almost 10,000 farms generated nearly $1.5 billion in sales in 2022, federal data shows. They employ about 25,000 farmworkers, the bill says.
“We can sure as hell take $60 million from the general fund and give it to an industry that spans the entire state and brings in over a billion dollars to the state of New Jersey,” Fantasia said. “We’re talking about people’s livelihoods and ability to keep jobs and stay in their homes.”
April’s freeze came as farmers already were struggling with rising labor, fertilizer, and fuel costs. Some smaller farms rely on a single season for their annual income, prompting industry observers to predict the freeze would force some growers to cut staff, sell off acreage, or quit farming altogether.
For those reasons, Fantasia expects legislators from both sides of the aisle will support the bill.
“There’s no question here: Severe losses happened. No product to sell. Devastating to the economy. Devastating to the jobs in New Jersey. I think it’s a no-brainer,” she said.
Hunterdon County farmer John Melick lost much of his peach, apple, cherry, plum, and pear crops to the April freeze.
Crop insurance has helped him recover, he said. But he welcomes any assistance the state wants to offer the fruit-growing industry, noting it would be most beneficial for smaller farmers, those without diversified crops, and the few who couldn’t afford or thought they didn’t need crop insurance.
“It’s not going to put me out of business if I don’t get it, but I won’t turn it away either,” Melick said of state aid.
He’d be more excited for Trenton’s intervention if legislators could control the weather, he joked, because the recent rainy stretch has kept customers away.
“I’m hoping for sunny weekends for October, so that the 30% crop that I do have I can sell to pick-your-own customers,” Melick said. “When it rains every Saturday and Sunday, they’re not coming out.”
A proposal for a two-story school for 160 students that Bancroft NeuroHealth plans on its Mount Laurel campus goes before the township planning board next week.
The nonprofit, based in Cherry Hill, would serve children ages 3 to 11 with autism and developmental disabilities in the building, according to documents with the application for preliminary and final major site plan approval.
A public hearing on Bancroft’s proposal is scheduled for the remote-only board meeting on Thursday, Oct. 8 at 6 p.m. via Zoom.
The 55,205-square-foot school at 311 Walton Ave. on Bancroft School’s Welsh Campus would have 188 staff members.
The school is scheduled to open in 2028 on former agricultural land that now is a lawn on the southeast part of the campus, according to the application.
Bancroft’s overall 80-acre Mount Laurel campus was approved by the planning board in 2016. A possible future expansion on the southwest part of the property is mentioned in the documents, but details were not provided.
Arsenic was found in soil on the proposed building site, but a report for Bancroft by Dewberry Engineers Inc., of Parsippany, states it is naturally occurring and not associated with historical agricultural activities or a discharge.
Dewberry reported it found no potentially contaminated areas of concern that required additional investigation.
70and73.com is a hyperlocal news site focused on South Jersey, including the communities of Cherry Hill, Evesham, Mount Laurel, Voorhees, Medford, Medford Lakes, and Moorestown.
Given the remarkable gloominess of the last 30 days, it would be reasonable to believe that the sun had lost its will to shine.
It is due to make a comeback by Thursday afternoon on the first day of a fresh month, but last month has entered the books as one of the wetter and cloudier Septembers in the period of available records.
Ordinarily, the September sun is some consolation for what is a month of rapidly shrinking daylight hours and lengthening nights. Not this time.
“Not your typical September,” said Ray Martin, lead meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Mount Holly, who has his own hypothesis that includes an indirect connection with the burgeoning El Niño event in the equatorial Pacific.
For some folks, the gloominess is more than an aesthetic issue: It can have deleterious effects on mood and overall well-being, mental health experts advise.
“We’re losing daylight quite rapidly, and a stretch of cloudy weather like we’ve certainly had lately can make that change feel even more pronounced,” said Alan Jacobson, a psychologist practicing in Massachusetts and a specialist in seasonal affective disorder, known as SAD.
What’s going on up there in the skies over Philly?
Perhaps both the sun and moon, whose fullness last weekend also was obscured by the clouds, had spent so much time out of the public eye they developed a certain shyness.
For the month, 18 days came close to or exceeded the criteria for “cloudy,” according to the weather service.
Unfortunately, sky-cover records are wanting since the agency radically changed the observation protocols — replacing humans with a sky-scanning machine — in the mid-1990s.
However, this September by far was the gloomiest since September of 2018, when close to 10 inches of rain was measured at Philadelphia International Airport. The 6.61 inches of September 2026 was the highest total since then.
As to why it has been so cloudy: “We’ve definitely had a lot of systems move through, a lot of moisture,” Martin said.
And why might that be?
This has become the longest wait on record for the first hurricane of the season in the Atlantic basin, as the warming of waters in the equatorial Pacific has interacted with the atmosphere to generate powerful storm-shearing winds from the West. It is at least possible that what’s not happening in the Atlantic has been a factor in the clouds over Philly.
“You could almost argue that the energy that normally would be expended in the tropics by hurricanes … maybe kind of worked its way north,” Martin said, but added: “That’s pure speculation.”
Whatever the cause, the lack of sun has not been exactly an energizer.
The effects of the lack of sunlight
To feel enervated and melancholy at times as the days shorten is a sure sign of normality, Phyllis Zee, a circadian and sleep-medicine specialist with the Northwestern University Medical Center, has observed.
The sunrise-to-sunset periods are shrinking by more than 2½ minutes daily in the Philadelphia region.
Plus, the sun is losing radiative power daily, and clouds dilute whatever reaches the surface.
Less light affects people in a variety of ways.
“For some people, reduced light can affect sleep, energy, concentration, and mood,” Jacobson said.
An estimated 5% of people experience serious symptoms of seasonal affective disorder, which is a form of depression, and 10% to 20% are affected by mild versions.
For those who do not require clinical intervention, Jacobson and other specialists advise that an excellent remedy would be to spend time in the sun (assuming it returns), especially in the morning
“Get outside and move your body daily,” said Tonya Ladipo, a Philadelphia therapist and founder of the Ladipo Group counseling service. “Even if it’s dark and cloudy, you’ll get some natural vitamin D in addition to the mood and energy boost that comes with being outside in fresh air.”
The sun is due for a comeback
And the sun is due to rule the day Friday, and it is at least possible it will show up Saturday and every day of the next workweek.
But showers are possible Friday night and rain is looking likely Sunday, although conditions certainly should not approach anything like last weekend’s.
Vineland residents who are some of the first in the Philly area to know what it’s like to live next to a massive AI data center share their experiences.
And the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission wants to know where you’re headed every day — and how you get there.
But a handful of local homeowners have the unique experience of seeing one from their houses — the DataOne facility in Vineland.
They used to have more neighbors before the data center developers and associates bought several homes that now appear to be abandoned.
Multiple residents commented on the excessive sound.
“I think of a prison, and I’m the prisoner with the noise,” said a homeowner of more than 47 years. “You get up in the morning and you’re in a foul mood.”
The DVRPC wants to know just about everything about people’s daily travel habits.
No, this is not about surveillance. After 13 years, the commission needs an updated survey to help guide funding decisions for infrastructure projects and transportation plans for the nine counties it serves, which include Burlington, Camden, and Gloucester.
Since January, it has been recruiting participants by mail to randomly selected households. Sorry, you can’t nominate yourself.
Those who opt in will have to track their household trips for 24 hours using a phone app. It’ll also ask the household basics: size, age, income, etc.
But how exactly will the experts use this information?
Five years after Clementon Park & Splash World was purchased at a bankruptcy auction, the recently shuttered 119-year-old amusement and water park is going back to auction this month.
Researchers have found microplastic pollution in every one of the 22 stream and river segments along the Delaware River tested in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New York. This includes Cooper River in Camden County.
Residents in Camden and Cherry Hill should be aware of possible detours and prepare to take alternative routes because of roadway projects scheduled for this week.
The Inquirer’s editorial board, which is separate from the newsroom, wrote that Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s call for now-former Lt. Gov. Dale Caldwell to resign set “an ethical example for a corrupt era.”
🗓️ The best things to do this week
🔮 Boos & Brews Witches Market: Check out this witch-themed market full of themed vendors and activities. Stick around for food trucks, a costume contest, performances, and a beer garden. ⏰ Friday, Oct. 2, 5-9 p.m. 💵 Pay as you go 📍 Rancocas Woods Events and Shops, Mount Laurel
📚 Collingswood Book Festival: The 24th annual festival is back spanning six blocks of Haddon Avenue. Come to meet booksellers and stay for author and poetry readings, performances, and workshops. ⏰ Saturday, Oct. 3, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. 💵 Free 📍 Haddon Avenue, Collingswood
🎨 Cranberry Fest: The 36th annual cranberry fest returns with live music, a food court, a beer garden, and more than 100 artisans. 💵 Pay as you go 📍 Farnsworth Avenue, Bordentown
When Amber Ayrer bought her Vineland home 25 years ago, she envisioned growing old there, enjoying lazy afternoons with the windows open and a view of farmland from her front door.
After her adult daughter, Ally, suffered a traumatic brain injury, Amber made the rancher accessible, installing a ramp that aides use to push Ally’s wheelchair outside for her daily walks.
The place had all the makings of a forever home, Amber Ayrer said — until a massive AI data center moved in across the street.
Now, the 71-year-old looks out her front windows at the hulking DataOne facility, a windowless compound surrounded by walls and metal fences.
In recent months, Ayrer said, the 2.4-million-square-foot complex has emitted a near-constant hum. She struggles to sleep, she said, and has suffered from headaches. She turns the TV on to mask the sound.
Residents who live farther away have also complained about the noise, including in a recent lawsuit that was thrown out due to procedural issues. In the suit, residents said the Cumberland County Department of Health measured the hum as higher than 50 decibels a mile away in the middle of the night. A sound higher than 50 decibels is equal to a running refrigerator and is 10 times louder than a typical suburban area at night.
Ayrer, who was not involved in the lawsuit, said she doesn’t want to move, even as she sees neighbors sell their homes to the data center developers.
“In order to get another home, I’d have to get one built” to be accessible, Ayrer said, standing in her entryway. She shrugged, adding, “I need to be here for my daughter.”
The noise had quieted, she noted, since around Sept. 22. That’s when the New Jersey DEP ordered the data center to pay a $1 million fine for running 62 gas generators without the required permits. She isn’t sure why the hum stopped, or whether it was related to the fine.
By late Wednesday, the sound had returned, she said, and she worried it would be even louder when the center is fully operational.
The Ayrers are some of the first Philly-area residents to live in the shadow of a massive AI data center. Only a handful of homeowners live within eyesight of DataOne’s South Lincoln Avenue complex in Vineland.
They used to have more neighbors. But since 2025, DataOne Vineland and LJR Real Estate — which is registered to the address of Northeast Precast, a local company that has partnered with DataOne — have purchased at least five surrounding homes for a combined $3 million, according to online property records.
DataOne and Northeast Precast did not respond to requests for comment about the acquisitions. Several former Vineland residents who sold their homes to these companies could not be reached or declined to comment.
Asked about residents’ concerns, DataOne spokesperson Naomi Rice shared a previous statement, which said in part that the facility was “transitioning to low-emission, quiet fuel cells.” These generate energy through an electrochemical reaction rather than combustion, pistons, or rotating machinery.
Nebius Group, which is operating the center’s internal AI infrastructure, says the fuel cells from Bloom Energy — a company expanding locally — and enhanced sound mitigation will make for a quieter environment than what residents experienced during construction, according to spokesperson Ava Iuliucci.
Charles-Antoine Beyney, DataOne’s founder and chief executive officer, previously said the Vineland center would use “breakthrough” technology to reduce its environmental impact. He said the complex would be a good neighbor, promising a vertical farm — which uses technology to grow crops indoors — to help feed Vineland residents in need.
“Most of the data centers that are being built today suck, big time,” Beyney said in January.
“No freaking way am I going to do what the entire industry is doing … just killing our communities and killing our lungs to make money.”
What it looks like near a South Jersey data center
The Vineland DataOne center, as seen in June, could be finished by the end of the year, developers have said. Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer
The dark exterior of DataOne abuts busy South Lincoln Avenue, towering above homes and farms on the outskirts of Vineland City. In spots, rows of crops extend to the data center’s walls.
On a recent day, the data center appeared abuzz with activity, although residents said it was relatively quiet, as cars and yellow school buses drove in and out of its gated-off parking lot. Giant “no trespassing” signs are prominently displayed.
While the front portion of the data center appeared complete, cranes farther back reached into the sky.
Meanwhile, several large homes across from the entrance — purchased by the data center developers and associates — appeared abandoned, with recycling cans askew in the driveways, indoor and outdoor lights on in the middle of the day, and swing sets sitting empty in the backyards. No one answered the doors.
At another home, a woman shook her head, saying she’d lived there forever and would never speak publicly about the development across the street.
DataOne, a French company that manages advanced data centers, is the owner, operator, and builder of the Vineland data center. Its client, Nebius Group, an Amsterdam-based AI-infrastructure company, operates the center’s internal technology, which fuels Microsoft’s AI tools.
As demand for these facilities has surged, so has the controversy surrounding them. Across the country, proposed complexes have received fierce pushback from nearby residents concerned about environmental, noise, quality-of-life, and property-value impacts.
Several of these facilities have been proposed in the Philadelphia region, from King of Prussia to Limerick. But few plans have been approved.
DataOne Vineland could become the region’s first hyperscale AI data center. The developers have said the complex is partially operational, and they expect it to be complete by the end of the year.
Construction continued on the DataOne center as seen from a nearby home in June.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer
Theresa Lewis, who has owned her home for 47 years, said living by the data center has gotten worse in recent months.
Stepping outside and seeing the building, “I think of a prison, and I’m the prisoner with the noise,” said Lewis, 74, who compares the sound to a tractor trailer idling outside her home all day and night.
“You get up in the morning and you’re in a foul mood,” Lewis said.
Both she and Ayrer said they have called the Cumberland County Department of Health to report excessive noise in the middle of the night, but doing so comes at a cost. They said they then have to get up, get dressed, turn the lights on, and wait for an official to come take a decibel reading, making for another sleepless night.
Data centers are being built in different communities
The view outside the Keystone Trade Center in Falls Township. Amazon is building a data center inside the private complex.Erin McCarthy/Staff
The scene in Vineland is vastly different from the one outside Amazon’s 2-million-square-foot data center campus in Falls Township, Bucks County, the Philadelphia region’s other facility nearing completion.
That data center sits deep inside the Keystone Trade Center, an industrial hub surrounded by water, with no homes in sight. On a recent day, tractor trailers whizzed by Keystone’s main entrance. Only the transmission wires overhead hinted at what may be inside the private property.
In Vineland, Lewis said she wishes she and her neighbors had a chance to push back against the data center before it was built. Residents were first asked to provide input about the project at a contentious town hall in January, more than a year after the project was approved by city council and months after construction started.
“I don’t want to move — and who is going to pay what the house is worth with that right there?” Lewis said, motioning to the data center across the street. “But I wake up angry.”
She added: “I can’t imagine living next to this for the rest of my life.”
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to reflect that the noise from the data center returned Wednesday, according to Ayrer.
The Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission is collecting granular information about daily travel: Where did people go? Why? Did they drive, take transit, walk, bike, or use an electric mobility device?
Planners working on the project aren’t nosy or trying to surveil anybody.
They need real-time data to update DVRPC’s travel demand model for the nine-county Philadelphia area that will guide funding decisions about infrastructure projects and transportation plans for the next decade.
“Compared to any other 10-year period that I can recall, there has just been so much transformation in how people travel,” said Mike Boyer, the agency’s director of regional planning.
Information from a new household travel survey will show a clear picture of exactly how it changed and provide clues about where regional transportation might be headed. The last household survey was conducted in 2012 and 2013 and a final version was published in 2015.
Typically, DVRPC conducts a travel survey every decade, but officials waited 13 years this time to allow transportation patterns to settle into a “new normal” after the massive disruptions of the pandemic.
How do they find households to take the travel survey?
Beginning in January, DVRPC has been recruiting participants by mailing postcard invitations to randomly selected households in South Jersey and Southeastern Pennsylvania. It has also used some social media posts.
People cannot reach out to nominate themselves.
Random invitations help ensure that respondents reflect the population of the region. Participants need to represent each of DVRPC’s nine counties, as well as a mix of households by income, size, number of workers, and other demographics.
It is expected to take the rest of the year to get the 9,000 to 10,000 completed household surveys required for a good picture of the region’s habits, said Matt Gates, associate director of travel trends and forecasts for DVRPC.
Based on typical response rates, it may take as many as 300,000 postcards to recruit enough participants, he said.
Recruitment paused for the summer and started up again after Labor Day.
DVRPC serves Burlington, Camden, Gloucester, and Mercer Counties in New Jersey as well as Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia Counties in Pennsylvania.
Survey data will be held confidential and anonymized, used in the research but not attached to any specific household or phone number, Boyer said.
“Data won’t be sold or used by any third party,” he said. “We want to be forthright about that.”
What do participants do?
Most will report household trips for one 24-hour period, starting around 2 a.m. or 3 a.m., using a smartphone app that runs in the background, tracking each trip via GPS.
When it detects what might be a trip, it prompts the participant to confirm it and provide details such as the trip’s purpose and what type of transportation is used.
“If you leave your house in the morning and go to work, and then you leave work and go somewhere for lunch, and then you go back to the office, and then, on the way home, you stop at the dry cleaner — all of those pieces of your daily travel are joined together,” said Gates, the chief travel modeler.
That would be counted as a “tour,” broken into separate trips, each attached to a specific activity.
The survey also asks for basic household information — size, ages, jobs, school attendance, income, and vehicles. E-bikes, e-scooters, personal mobility devices for people with disabilities, traditional pedal-powered bicycles, and walking will be counted as separate modes of travel.
In the 2012-13 survey, walking and biking were separate options, but the travel model combined them in one category called “nonmotorized.” A catchall “other” category covered everything else.
Participants who do not want to use the app can keep a paper travel diary and then either enter their trip information on a website or reach a call center, where a person will walk them through the questions and record the data.
How will the information be used?
After it is fed into the travel model, DVRPC will use it to help draft a Transportation Improvement Program (TIP). That is the federally mandated priority list for allocating federal and state funding of transportation, transit, and highway projects across the region.
But that’s not all.
Planners use it to decide on traffic safety projects, to chart where new recreational trails should go, and to test scenarios in response to events.
Combining the data with information about the transportation network can provide insight into how people make decisions about, say, using a SEPTA train vs. driving between two points, Gates said. “Is it time? Is it cost? The number of vehicles available in a household?”
A good travel demand model with those insights can help answer “what if” questions such as what effect a new train line or highway would have, or rising gas prices, transit fare increases, and service cuts, Gates said.
It can help planners think about how the transportation network could accommodate a spurt of growth in Quakertown, Bucks County, for example, or Woolwich Township, Gloucester County.
Last year DVRPC used existing data to project added motor vehicle traffic amid SEPTA service cuts, which began but were quickly rolled back.
The extent to which hybrid work and e-commerce may be reducing trips per person or household. For example: How many shopping trips have been replaced by deliveries?
Transit changes: They want to understand SEPTA’s ridership recovery from COVID-19 and how often people are using transit for a mix of nonwork trips at different times, rather than just traditional commutes.
How are people using ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft, which have mushroomedover the last decade?
A shark was captured on video swimming in the flooded streets of Surf City in Ocean County while the region was battered by the nor’easter last weekend.
The video was recorded by Drew Procaccino, 66, an adjunct professor at Rider University, around noon on Saturday as the shark swam past his home, he said in a phone interview.
Procaccino said Surf City was “totally flooded” because of the powerful storm, and he lost internet service for around 48 hours, so he and his wife passed time watching debris float by until his wife noticed something that appeared to be a fish.
Then they realized it might be a shark, he said.
“First one we’ve ever seen in front of our house,” Procaccino said.
At first he shared the video with some news organizations, including ABC News, and then he licensed his video with Storyful, the social media news agency.
ABC News said a marine researcher reviewed the video and identified the animal as a smooth dogfish, which can be found along the Atlantic coast from Massachusetts to Florida.
The smooth dogfish, also known as the dusky smooth-hound or dog shark, on average grow to about 48 inches in length, but have been known to measure up to 5 feet.
Unlike other sharks, the smooth dogfish has flat, blunt teeth for grinding crustaceans and other small prey, rather than sharp teeth for tearing apart animals.
“Hero! Bobby Capri takes off his shoes, jumps into the tidepool, catches a dogfish, and throws it back into the inlet — just in time from it becoming lunch for a very interested seagull,” the state park posted.
Potential buyers can either continue operating the park, spanning more than 50 acres in Camden County, as an amusement destination or redevelop the property in a variety of ways, including as a hotel or for retail, residential, or entertainment uses, according to the property listing.
The public auction is set to begin Oct. 19 at noon with bids starting at $1.5 million, the listing shows. The 48-hour auction window is scheduled to close at noon on Oct. 21.
IB Parks & Entertainment bought the park for $2.37 million in the 2021 bankruptcy auction after financial struggles forced the park to shut down suddenly two years earlier.
“After five memorable years, we are saddened to announce that we have made the difficult decision to close the park and plan to offer the park for sale,” the company said in a statement announcing the closure on its website and social media accounts earlier this month. “It has been a privilege to care for a place that has meant so much to generations of families.”
At the time of the closure, the park was one of five amusement properties owned by the company, including West Berlin’s Sahara Sam’s.
IB Parks & Entertainment did not respond to requests for comment.
Clementon Park opened in 1907 as the brainchild of state Assembly member Theodore B. Gibbs and his sons and quickly became a popular destination for families across South Jersey.
After years of being independently owned by various families, the park was bought by its first private amusement park operation company in 2007.
With various management companies at the helm over the next decade, the park expanded significantly with the addition of new thrill rides, children’s attractions, and a 23,000-square-foot wave pool.
The Trump administration is no longer planning to detain immigrants at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office.
Back in July 2025, the administration confirmed its intent to hold detainees at the military base to support the president’s goals for mass deportations. The base, which spreads through Burlington and Ocean Counties, can hold an estimated 1,000 to 3,000 people.
Fast forward to fall of the same year, officials told the office they weren’t moving forward with the plans.
Teachers and other school staff in Camden, Pemberton, Evesham, and nine other local districts will have to grapple with higher healthcare costs next year.
They’re among the 300,000 public school and county college employees across the state who will be impacted by health insurance premiums rising by more than a third.
The School Employees Health Benefits Commission voted 4-2 to accept the premiums on Friday. If it hadn’t, Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s administration would have shuttered the program in the new year.
According to the New Jersey School Boards Association, school districts and colleges will likely need to consider options such as job cuts, transportation reductions, and property tax increases.
In November, Camden County voters will decide whether to increase the open space tax by one cent per $100 of property owned. The increase would partly fund a $400 million project to rehab sewers and waterways. The Inquirer’s Aliya Schneider explains what to know about the project the referendum would support.
Students at Aura Elementary School in Elk Township are pivoting to remote learning because of the building’s flea infestation.
Much of the Pine Barrens region will be the focus of a new study to assess climate change threats. It will include Evesham, Medford, Medford Lakes, Shamong, and Tabernacle.
Consumer Reports is no longer recommending e-scooters because of the machines’ high speeds and the nationwide uptick in injuries associated with them. E-scooters are less stable than e-bikes, but there are recent limits on those as well. New Jersey’s e-bike laws requiring licenses, registrations, and, in some cases, insurance went into effect in July.
This past weekend’s nor’easter put on display the limits of computer models. Meanwhile, the region could be affected this weekend by the remnants of a tropical storm from the Pacific.
🧠Trivia time
Which park got its own beer to celebrate its 100th birthday?
Highlights of this four-bedroom, four-bathroom home include 18-foot ceilings, a wood-burning fireplace, a finished basement, a home theater, and granite countertops and double ovens in the kitchen. Outside the home, enjoy the deck in the fenced backyard for extra entertaining. There’s an open house Sunday from 1 to 3 p.m.
The temperature was in the low 70s with a light breeze and clear skies. It was perfect boating weather. A group of students from Philadelphia’s Maritime Academy were excited to paddle out onto the Cooper River.
But Don Baugh from the Upstream Alliance had to cancel the trip. The water was still too dirty from the weekend’s heavy rain, which can cause sewage to spit out into the river from old pipes in Camden.
“Our goal is that we don’t have to cancel at all … we’d be able to say anybody can recreate, play, swim, on this water 365 days of the year, whether it rained or not,” Baugh said from his motorboat on Tuesday, surrounded by greenery and mud-colored water.
That is why Baugh hopes voters will support a ballot referendum in Camden County that would increase the open space tax by one cent per $100 of property owned. That one-cent increase would go toward the county’s ambitious plan to rehabilitate its sewers and waterways through a multifaceted initiative that is slated to cost about $400 million across the next 10 years. It has become more urgent, county officials say, as powerful storms and flooding become more commonplace due to climate change.
The nonprofit Upstream Alliance provides free kayaking to the public, but the organization has had to cancel about 20% of its programming due to concerns about water cleanliness, Baugh said. His rule of thumb is to wait 48 hours after half an inch of rain falls before allowing people in the water, so the bacteria from the sewage can die. But even that was not enough time following the weekend’s storm.
Put frankly, the water still looked “yucky,” Baugh said, so he was not going to expose people to it.
Olivia Liu with Upstream Alliance on the Cooper River in Camden County on Tuesday. A tax increase ballot referendum would fund projects like sewer rehabilitations aimed at improving the county’s waterways.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer
What is the referendum?
Camden County voters have already been receiving their mail ballots for the Nov. 3 election. One of the decisions they face is whether to raise the county’s open space tax by one cent — bringing it to $0.03 per $100 of assessed property value. If it passes, the tax will still be one cent lower than in neighboring Burlington and Gloucester Counties.
This means that someone with property assessed at $500,000 would pay $150 a year toward open space, up from $100 at the current $0.02 rate.
The county’s open space tax is used to preserve parks, farmland, and historic sites. But the one-cent increase would be dedicated to the county’s $400 million clean water plan, which includes sewer repairs along the Cooper River, green infrastructure, dredging in local lakes, and recreation programs.
“The county is making a very bold step doing this now, and, frankly, nobody wants a tax, right? But everybody wants a higher quality of life,” Baugh said. “Everybody wants a safe and clean environment today and for tomorrow.”
Scott Schreiber, the executive director of the Camden County Municipal Utilities Authority (CCMUA) —the entity overseeing the project — believes the county could raise about $7 million from the tax increase, which could result in approximately $100 million worth of project funding through the New Jersey Water Bank, which offers the entity very low interest rates and principal forgiveness.
The existing user rate that residents pay to the CCMUA will go toward the projects, Schreiber said, and the county will also seek out funds from the state and federal governments, as well as philanthropies.
“It’s not one entity that can fix this,” Schreiber said. “This is going to take a combination of local government, state, federal government, advocacy groups, and the regular public to make this work. Without that combination of people and funding, it’s going to be really impossible to fix any of this stuff.”
Here is what the $400 million effort, which the tax increase would go toward funding, entails.
A combined sewer overflow site during low tide on Tuesday. This 60-inch discharge pipe spits out untreated wastewater and stormwater during heavy rain events, which flow directly into the back channel of the Delaware River.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer
The sewer problem
The cities of Camden and Gloucester have an antiquated sewage system that combines stormwater and sewage in the same pipes. The pipes are designed to carry the combined liquid to the wastewater treatment plant, but when there is heavy rain, they can overflow and the contaminated water spits into the Cooper and Delaware Rivers. The overflow from the combined pipes can cause flooding — and then residents are subjected to sewage-infested waters in their streets and homes.
“These are the old stone pipes that were built before the current technology,” Camden County Commissioner Jeffrey Nash said.
“But as both cities grew, and the storms have become more violent, and rain has become more excessive … flooding has been a large problem,” he added.
On top of the risks to humans, the nutrients from the human waste are harmful for aquatic life.
There are 30 combined sewage overflow spots in the two cities, Schreiber said, that dump waste into the river when there is heavy rain and the system cannot handle it. Just one of the larger combined pipes pours out about 200 million gallons of sewage-filled water a year, he said, and the two cities dump out about 800 million gallons on average altogether.
The county wants to spend $200 million to upgrade this system.
The rest of the county has separate stormwater and sewage pipes, but they still need to be maintained. Leaky pipes can also cause sewage to spill into the river.
The county plans to spend about $50 million for the rehabilitation of these sewer systems across multiple municipalities. The county has already begun the design process for lining some of these pipes, Schreiber said.
The bottom line is, the Cooper River — which runs from Gibbsboro and Voorhees out to the Delaware River — does not meet state and federal water quality standards, he said, so the county is taking a “holistic approach” to fix the waterway that flows through multiple municipalities.
Wildlife along the back channel of the Delaware River near the Cooper River on Tuesday.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer
Green infrastructure
The plan also includes $25 million for green infrastructure, like rain gardens or bioswales, which are typically sloped channels covered with vegetation.
Green infrastructure gets water directly into the ground, which helps with flooding and decreases the amount of water going through the pipes to the treatment plant, overall alleviating the system. This infrastructure, however, requires expensive and ongoing maintenance, Schreiber said.
“The more that you contain the water on the land, the better it is for the water,” Baugh said.
Dredging
The project also includes $75 million for dredging and other methods of removing sediment from public waterways. This sediment includes toxins that end up in the water from residential and business areas, and if it is not removed, waterways can become defunct. It is part of what makes Camden County’s waterways brown after heavy rain, because “a lot of not-good stuff on the bottom” gets stirred up, Schreiber said.
“We really want to make sure that we’re taking that sediment out, so that even if it does get disturbed and move, it’s moving clean sediment and not polluting or contaminating,” he added.
Cleaning up Evans Pond and Wallworth Lake, Cooper River Lake, and Kirkwood Lake are priorities for the county.
Newton Lake Park, which runs through Haddon Township, Collingswood, and Oaklyn, finished a two-year, $23 million dredging process in 2023 that rehabilitated the lake after it became clogged. And just on Tuesday, the county unveiled the results of a $1.3 million project to improve fishing piers at the rejuvenated lake.
Don Baugh, president and founder of Upstream Alliance is on the Delaware River on Tuesday with Scott Schreiber (right), executive director of the Camden County Municipal Utilities Authority, looking at sewage runoff from Camden’s waterways.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer
Parts of Camden’s waterways are littered with lead and arsenic that was used in apple orchards decades ago in places like Cherry Hill and Voorhees, as well as toxins from the Sherwin-Williams/Hilliards Creek Superfund site, the location of a former paint manufacturer in Gibbsboro.
Recreation
Baugh said local families who do not have experience on the water and might not know how to swim show up to his free Saturday kayaking program disappointed that they cannot go out on a nice day. As the county gradually addresses its sewage issues, he expects to feel better putting people out on the water under his 48-hour rule and one day get rid of it completely.
And the county’s plan would give more options for residents to enjoy their local waters, with $50 million allocated to restoring recreational lake areas. This effort aims to bring more fishing piers, kayak rentals, boat launches, and water trail systems, Schreiber said. The county is prioritizing rehabilitating Atco Lake, Lake Worth, and Audubon Lake, according to its planning document.
Nash described exploring the county’s urban waterways as a “great thrill.” He wants more residents in Camden to enjoy it, too.
Each of the plan’s components has distinct advantages, but taken together their benefits amplify, Schreiber said.
“And if you do that holistically from the top of the county all the way down, you’re going to have a much more clean and friendly park system and river water system,” he added.
