Development decisions affect neighboring towns News that the Two Rivers Water Reclamation Authority has imposed a two-year ban on new sewer connections for some types of development in 12 local towns should serve as a wake-up call for local and county officials. Up to this point, decisions on development applications have been decided by the planning or zoning boards of the host municipality. The sewer ban demonstrates dramatically that development decisions actually have a collective impact. This issue may have a lower profile, but most of us can relate to traffic, density, water usage and pollution as issues related to development that affect us all. The town-centric way of doing business ignores the fact that what happens in one municipality surely affects its neighbors. This point was driven home recently when the Tinton Falls Planning Board approved an application for a big-box Home Depot on Wayside Road. Middletown Township Councilman Thomas G. Hall, representing the municipal government, and Middletown residents attended the June 27 meeting to oppose the application and voice concerns over the impact it would have on traffic in their township, particularly the Lincroft section. In a letter to the editor, Hall urged Tinton Falls planners to "lend an ear to concerns of neighboring communities … ." (Hall's constituents got a reprieve after all: the TRWRA ban reportedly will hold up the Home Depot project). With a finite amount of acreage left for development in the county, and build-out a very real eventuality, now is the time to acknowledge that development affects more than just nearby towns, but the entire region. When contacted about the TRWRA ban, a county planning board official referred the reporter to the local municipalities. This view must change. The county planning board is positioned to step up to the plate and lead the county's 53 municipalities in considering the countywide or regional impact of their development decisions. If municipal land use law needs to be tweaked to enable this broader perspective, the county and municipalities should lobby for change. More than 600,000 people share this patch of Earth called Monmouth County. We need to start making decisions about development as if the quality of all of our lives depends on it.