An investment today for a better tomorrow.

Much of New Jersey’s drinking and wastewater infrastructure (pipes, mains, and other water delivery assets) is rapidly approaching the end of its useful life. With a significant percentage of New Jersey’s drinking water infrastructure having been installed between 1880 and 1960, most of it has or soon will have reached its reasonably expected life span. The problem is real and accelerating, but it is also masked because much of the infrastructure is underground and out of sight.

It is clear that the time to accelerate investment in the facilities that deliver nearly half the State’s drinking water is now.

The communities served by New Jersey’s regulated water companies are challenged to meet these infrastructure demands while at the same time having to make significant capital investments to meet Safe Drinking Water Act requirements.

These are the inevitable impacts of not starting to address this problem now:

• An unreliable supply of safe drinking water
• Increased service interruptions
• More frequent and costly emergency repairs
• Insufficient water flow and pressure to ensure fire protection
• Insufficient flow and pressure for industrial and personal water use
• Inadequate water infrastructure to support local and state economic growth.

For the nearly 4.5 million people in 321 towns across the State who are served by private water companies regulated by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (BPU), there is a viable solution. It lies within the framework of a new program that the BPU is proposing—a distribution system improvement program—similar to initiatives that have already been implemented successfully in New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Connecticut, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Ohio, New Hampshire, and Los Angeles, CA.