To the editor: I have read the latest (March 16) draft resolution of the West Milford Council regarding the Highlands Regional Master Plan. I thank them for a good start, but it doesn’t go far enough. It requests the removal of the Planned Community Zones (“Purple Blotches”) in the lake communities. However, it should request their removal in all of West Milford. For all West Milford lakes, most man-made pollution is not from the lake community itself, but rather from a large drainage basin for the given lake. Surveys show that Pinecliff Lake has a 7-square mile drainage basin. That includes the up-stream Belchers Creek Corridor and much of the central area of town where road drainage pipes go directly into Pinecliff. Pinecliff’s pollution, including phosphorus to fertilize water weeds and algae, comes from Olde Milford Estates, Crescent Park, Bald Eagle Village and potentially from future Eagle Ridge and Valley Ridge developments all of which drain into Belchers Creek, the upstream-provider of Pinecliff’s water. As Pinecliff’s Environmental Trustee, about 1.5 years ago, I went to court many times, along with the West Milford Health Department, against a Union Valley Road facility that sent almost-raw sewage into a township road’s drainage system, and then into our lake. After Pinecliff, several additional communities drain into Belchers Creek to pollute Greenwood Lake. West Milford just received a grant of almost a million dollars to upgrade Greenwood Lake’s water quality. Should West Milford permit purple blotched areas to provide for the possibility of future pollution of Greenwood Lake? The current resolution is seriously flawed in that it does not require the removal of the planned community zones in the Belchers-Creek Corridor. Purple blotches currently exist on the Highlands map in areas on Union Valley, Macopin and Ridge Roads that would drain their pollution into Pinecliff and Greenwood Lakes. As all of West Milford is in the drainage basin of one or another lake, the town council’s resolution must demand that the Highlands Council remove the planned communities (Purple Blotches) from the Highlands Map for all of West Milford. That is the only way to comply with the Highlands Water Protection and Planning Act. West Milford supplies water to millions of NJ residents, and West Milford’s own water quality must be preserved from increased high-density development and its associated pollution, and also from its negative impact on water quantity by depleting our scarce ground-water aquifer. If even one Purple Blotch remains on the Highlands map for West Milford, that provides a legal precedent indicating that the Highlands Council has jurisdiction to zone West Milford in ways that would harm our town. Thus, in the future they could decide to add more purple blotches for developing yet more sewered, planned communities. Not that long ago, our residents and council members fought hard against having an area of Newark-Watershed, which was less than one acre, from becoming a road into a 466 acre tract off of Macopin Rd. If West Milford had not won that battle, that small area would have provided a legal precedent to break the building-moratorium on Newark’s land in West Milford. Our town council’s Highlands-resolution must not permit even a single purple blotch to become a precedent for hundreds more to appear in the future. Doris Aaronson West Milford