JERSEY WATER WORKS HOLDS THEIR 2018 ANNUAL CONFERENCE

The New Jersey Infrastructure Bank was one of the organizational members that were present at the 2018 Annual Jersey Water Works (JWW) Conference held on Friday, December 7th at the NJ Performing Arts Center in Newark, to improve New Jersey's Water Infrastructure.  

Individual members of the collaborative publicly committed to take significant actions in the coming year. Mark Mauriello, Director of Environmental Affairs and Planning at Edgewood Properties and co-chair of the JWW Steering Committee remarked that "The sheer variety of these commitments is an exciting example of the type of innovation that is happening here in New Jersey around water infrastructure. It takes all of us, with all our areas of expertise, to tackle a problem as complex as this. At the end of 2019, the individuals and organizations who are making a commitment today to these actions will have made a material difference to how well our water systems work, and in doing so will have contributed to the quality of life of virtually every New Jerseyan."  

Catherine McCabe, Commissioner of the State's Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) affirmed that water was one of the DEP's top priorities, and that her Department was  working on ways to address the challenges of funding infrastructure upgrades as well as to provide support for the development of robust asset management plans. She said the DEP is focusing on the problem of contaminations such as PFAS chemicals and is working to develop a framework to address this problem that she hopes will become a national model. 

The conference keynote speaker Manny Teodoro, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Texas A&M University and an expert on the topic of water affordability, praised New Jersey's Water Quality Accountability Act, which he said will serve as a national model affording the opportunity to gather vital data.  When the data required by the act is collected, he said, "we will know the full nexus of the relationship between cost, affordability, water quality, system performance, environmental quality and capital investment. We will be able to quantify the health and economic benefits of investment in water."