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The New York / New Jersey Harbor Estuary Program

US Environmental Protection Agency
Region II
290 Broadway
New York, NY 10007

Hudson River Foundation
40 West 20th Street
9th Floor
New York, NY 10011 212 924-8290
212 924-8325 (Fax)
http://www.hudsonriver.org/

The Harbor Estuary Program (HEP) is a National Estuary Program authorized in 1987 by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The program is a multi-year effort to develop and implement a plan to protect, conserve, and restore the estuary. Participants in the program include representatives from local, state, and federal environmental agencies, scientists, citizens, business interests, environmentalists, and others.

The primary planning document produced by the program is the Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan (CCMP), completed in March of 1996 and signed by the governors of New York and New Jersey the fall of 1997.

The New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary was designated and "Estuary of National Significance" in 1988 by the US Environmental Protection Agency, in response to a request by the two state Governors. The HEP was convened as a partnership of federal, state, and local governments; scientists; civic and environmental advocates; the fishing community; business and labor leaders; and educators (called the Management Conference). The mission of the Conference was to develop a plan to protect and restore the Estuary. In 1987, Congress also required the preparation of a restoration plan for the New York Bight, the ocean area extending approximately 100 miles beyond Harbor waters. Because the Harbor and Bight are inextricably linked within the larger ecosystem, the two plans were joined.

The New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary includes the waters of New York Harbor and the tidally influenced portions of all rivers and streams that empty into the Harbor.

The shaded area in the map to the right is considered the "core area" because it is generally the most degraded. -- It extends from the tidal waters of the Hudson-Raritan Estuary from Piermont Marsh in New York State to an imaginary line (the Sandy Hook-Rockaway Point Transect) connecting Sandy Hook, New Jersey, and Rockaway Point, New York, at the mouth of the Harbor. This core area includes the bi-state waters of the Hudson River, Upper and Lower Bays, Arthur Kill, Kill van Kull, and Raritan Bay. In New York, the area includes the East and Harlem Rivers and Jamaica Bay, and in New Jersey it includes the Hackensack, Passaic, Raritan, Shrewsbury, Navesink, and Rahway Rivers, and Newark and Sandy Hook Bays.

The Bight is the ocean area extending approximately 100 miles offshore from the Sandy Hook-Rockaway Point Transect to the Continental Slope. Almost 240 miles of sandy shoreline, extending from Cape May, New Jersey, to Montauk Point, Long Island, form its landward border. There are several back bays that are located behind the barrier beaches outside the core area of the Harbor. Some of the larger back bays adjacent to the Bight are the Great South Bay, Shinnecock Bay, and Moriches Bay in New York, and Barnegat Bay, Great Bay, Great Egg Harbor, and Little Egg Harbor in New Jersey.

Although the focus of the HEP management plan is on the Harbor and Bight, the drainage basin or watershed of the Estuary encompasses about 16,300 square miles, including much of eastern New York, northern New Jersey, and small parts of western Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont. The quality of the Estuary’s waters is affected not only by activities occurring directly in the Harbor and Bight but also by industrial, agricultural, land use, and other individual practices throughout this larger watershed. As rainwater moves over the land in the watershed, it carries with it many potential pollutants that eventually end up in the Estuary – oil dumped down storm drains, pesticides from farms, lawn fertilizers, oil and gasoline from highway runoff, sewage from failed septic tanks, and sediment from construction projects.

All content copyright New York/New Jersey Harbor Estuary Program 1999