Policy Notes: June - July 2026

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The REAL Rules Got Delayed

It is difficult to understate just how disappointed environmental advocates like Pinelands Alliance and our partners are by the fact that Governor Sherill has delayed key climate protections for coastal communities. However, for regulators such as the Pinelands Commission staff, this delay seemed to come as a relief, giving them at least another year to figure out finer details.

The same day that the delay had been announced, the Pinelands Commission staff had coincidentally already planned a presentation on this topic. Two dense presentations covered how New Jersey’s newly adopted Resilient Environments and Landscapes (REAL) rules — DEP’s overhaul of coastal, stormwater, wetlands, and flood hazard standards, finalized in January after more than a year of revision — will land on Pinelands regulatory review.

The problems described by the staff are not necessarily with the rules themselves, but with the way that their adoption highlighted the ways in which the Pinelands Commission’s work is tangled up with that of the NJDEP. Over the decades, these two government agencies have amassed a series of complicated and often outdated MOA’s that govern the areas of overlap in their work in ways that neither side would probably describe as efficient or effective.

A delay buys time to sort through it all without applicants getting caught in the gap. While we would strongly prefer that the REAL rules be put into effect immediately, we hope that the delay will at least be used to prepare proper implementation of the rules, and will not be leveraged as an opportunity to water them down.

Kudos to Waterford Township

Most large development proposals that come through the Pinelands Area lean on a thin slice of affordable units — often no more than 20% — to satisfy state obligations while building market-rate everything else around them. Waterford Township’s Haines Boulevard Redevelopment Plan does the opposite. The Township is amending zoning it already had certified by the Commission back in 2017 to enable a second 100% affordable housing project on township-owned land within its Regional Growth Area, one of the larger remaining undeveloped tracts there. Staff is working with the Township to make sure the zoning changes preserve adequate density potential and keep the door open for Pinelands Development Credits — the tool that lets growth get concentrated in already-designated areas while sending money to preserve land elsewhere.

This is what using the CMP’s tools as intended looks like: real affordable housing, sited in a growth area built to absorb it, without treating the Pinelands’ land-use limits as an obstacle to route around.

What Happens When Pinelands Properties Outgrow Their Approvals?

Two enforcement cases on the docket illustrate the same problem from different directions: development that outgrows its permit and simply keeps going, intentionally or unintentionally.

In Weymouth Township, a campground has expanded a 16.5-acre campground well past what was ever approved — converting roughly 15 seasonal sites into year-round single-family dwellings, adding recreational buildings, internal roads, and additional campsites that spill onto adjacent parcels, all without so much as an application to the Commission. The septic system was sized for a seasonal campground. Whether it was sized for what’s effectively become a year-round residential subdivision is a different question. And this isn’t a gray area about whether the use has quietly shifted, as some residents have reportedly enrolled their children in local schools.

In Franklin Township, Sweet Amalia Farm Market and Kitchen has been trying since 2023 to resolve a violation from converting a retail farm market into a restaurant without approval — a change that matters because restaurant wastewater generation is different from retail, and the Commission’s groundwater quality standards are calculated around septic dilution capacity. The fix staff identified in May took nearly three years to land on: cut operating days from 298 to 251 annually, and the math on wastewater generation finally works.  

The Pinelands Is Losing Its UNESCO Status… Again

The Pinelands National Reserve has held international recognition as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve since 1983, one of the reasons it’s often described as an experiment in reconciling development with ecological protection that the rest of the world has taken note of. That status is set to lapse at the end of this year, not because of anything happening locally, but because the Trump administration announced in July 2025 that the United States would withdraw from UNESCO entirely with the withdrawal taking effect December 31, 2026.

This is a rerun: The first Trump administration withdrew from UNESCO in 2018, and the U.S. only rejoined under President Biden— a gap of roughly five years during which American sites, the Pinelands included, kept their designations in name but lost the practical benefits of active membership: eligibility for new World Heritage nominations, participation in the scientific research networks that UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere program coordinates internationally, and the standing to influence how the network itself evolves.

The Pinelands Commission isn’t the body that can do anything about this one. But it’s worth naming plainly: an internationally recognized reserve is about to spend another stretch of years outside the system that recognized it, for reasons that have nothing to do with the Pinelands and everything to do with national politics.

Shamong Gets a Roundabout

Stokes Road and Willow Grove Road ranks seventh among Burlington County’s most hazardous intersections, and after a federal review process slowed by COVID-19 and a required cultural resource survey, the County’s answer is a modern roundabout — the kind with mountable curbs, sightlines that make it hard to misjudge another driver’s speed, and, per the County’s traffic engineer, roughly a quarter of the conflict points of a standard four-way intersection. The case for it rested less on volume than on pattern: this is a low-traffic, high-crash intersection, dominated by right-angle collisions, and the County’s data suggests blinking lights installed years ago haven’t changed that. Even the closure of Atco Raceway, initially expected to ease things, hasn’t shown up as an improvement in the crash numbers.

Seemingly in response to the community pushback against the project at the Commission’s previous meeting, Pinelands Commissioners examined the justification for the traffic intervention. That is not usually in their wheelhouse, since they are just responsible for environmental review of Pinelands-specific concerns. However, questions raised by the public threw into question whether this environmental disturbance would truly be justified.

The commissioners’ questions did most of the real work of scrutiny. Commissioner Irick pressed on the scope — three infiltration basins, three-quarters of a mile of new paving, and property takings that the County was light on specifics about — and asked the more pointed question of whether lowering the speed limit might address the crash pattern on its own. The County’s answer was a flat no: speed limits are set by statute or survey, not by commissioner preference, and the geometry of a roundabout does the work that a speed limit sign can’t. The reference point that seemed to land hardest was a similar roundabout in Chesterfield Township, built at an intersection where a child died in a school bus crash years earlier — a project that had been planned before the tragedy and only accelerated by it. The resolution passed 11–0, with Irick voting yes while remaining on record as unconvinced that the County had done enough on speed.

Months since the Pinelands Municipal Council Last Met: 45