New Jersey building owners have until Sept. 12, 2026, to have a written Legionella water management program on paper, and until December 12, 2026 to be running it.
For anyone responsible for a cooling tower in the Garden State, those two dates change what a water treatment program is expected to produce. Not just controlled water. Evidence that it stayed controlled.
If you’re a facility director or director of engineering at a New Jersey hospital, senior living community, hotel, or high-rise residential portfolio, you’ll want to keep reading. So should anyone running a cooling tower at a commercial, institutional, or industrial site. Both groups are covered. They are not covered in the same way, and the difference decides how much work this law creates for you.
Bottom line, if you’re the owner or administrator of one of these building types in New Jersey and don’t have a Legionella management plan … you’ll need one. Then, you’ll have to show that you’re sticking to it over time.
P.L. 2024, c.66, signed on Sept. 12, 2024, requires the owner or operator of a covered building to develop a water management program to minimize the growth and transmission of Legionella, consistent with ASHRAE Standard 188-2018 or subsequent versions, or a comparable standard from a nationally recognized organization.
Coverage is broad. It includes:
It also covers, in a category of its own, any building containing an open-circuit or closed-circuit cooling tower or evaporative condenser serving an HVAC or refrigeration system. That provision brings in a large population of commercial, institutional, and industrial properties that have never carried a Legionella-specific obligation before.
One detail in the law is worth your attention. Section 6(a)(3) of the law (N.J.S.A. 26:1A-140(a)(3)) describes a set of buildings for which a program is needed only for the device in question, not for the whole building:
“a building containing a whirlpool, spa, pool, open-circuit or closed-circuit cooling tower or evaporative condenser that provides cooling or refrigeration for a heating, ventilation, air conditioning, or refrigeration system, indoor ornamental fountain, mister, atomizer, air wash, humidifier, or other non-potable water system or device that releases water aerosols in the building or on the property upon which the building is located. A building with a device listed in this paragraph shall implement a water management program for the listed device and need not implement a water management program for the entire building unless otherwise indicated by this subsection.”
That is a mouthful, so here is what it means in practice. The last clause is the one to watch. A property in scope only because it operates one of these devices can limit its program to that device. A hospital, nursing home, correctional facility, six-floor residential building, hotel, or covered senior housing property is covered under its own criterion, so for those facilities the tower is one control point inside a whole-building program, not a substitute for one. Confirm your own facility type against the statute before you scope the work.
Recordkeeping is not a secondary requirement. The written program, documentation of every procedure conducted, and any test results must be kept on the premises for at least five years and made available to the Department of Health immediately upon request. Owners must also post a notice on the premises confirming a program is in place. Civil penalties reach $2,000 for a first violation, $5,000 for a second or subsequent violation, and $10,000 for a violation that causes serious injury or death.
Building owner obligations sit in the statute itself, so they apply on schedule whether or not implementing rules are final by September.
Most cooling tower programs already perform the technical work the law contemplates. What changes is the standard of proof.
Under an ASHRAE 188 framework, a cooling tower becomes a control point with defined control limits, scheduled monitoring, and documented corrective action when a reading falls outside those limits. A service ticket showing that a technician visited and product was added does not answer the question that follows a case investigation, which is whether control held between visits.
That distinction lands hardest on chemical delivery. Slug feeding a biocide produces a residual curve with peaks well above target and troughs well below it. Averaged across a month, the program looks healthy. Measured against a control limit at the moment a sample is drawn, it may not be. CDC guidance for cooling towers is direct on the point: disinfectant residual should be monitored and adjusted by an automated system. Its operating recommendations go further, directing facilities to automate anti-corrosion, anti-scale, and disinfectant addition and monitoring, and its design guidance calls for installing an automated water treatment system.
Deposit control also moves from an efficiency concern to a documented Legionella control measure.
CDC identifies sediment and biofilm as one of four key factors affecting Legionella growth in cooling towers, alongside temperature, water age, and disinfectant residual. The control measures it names for sediment and biofilm are cleaning frequency and scale and corrosion inhibitors, with instruction to monitor inhibitor levels frequently based on water quality measurements.
One point of precision is worth making here: CDC frames these cooling tower specifics against ASHRAE Guideline 12, a companion document to Standard 188 rather than a substitute for it. A program written to satisfy New Jersey’s Standard 188 requirement can adopt them without conflict. Scale and biofilm shelter organisms from oxidant contact, so an inhibitor program that drifts is a biocide program that underperforms.
Under the new law, both are on the record.
Sampling obligations vary by building type, and the difference is easy to miss.
The statute requires periodic sampling and testing for hospitals, long-term care facilities, outbreak-associated sites, and any building where CDC recommends it. For other covered buildings, including many in scope solely because of a cooling tower, sampling may be part of the program rather than being mandatory. Where testing is performed, it must include Legionella pneumophila, and ASHRAE 188 together with CDC guidance governs how results are interpreted and acted on.
Scope each site, then scope it down. Determine which buildings are covered and on what basis. Where a tower is the trigger, build the program around the tower rather than the whole building.
Write control limits you can hold. A control limit is a commitment. Set biocide residual, inhibitor concentration, conductivity, and pH ranges that reflect what the system actually achieves under summer load, not an idealized target that generates a corrective action every week.
Close the gap between service visits. Identify where the program depends on an operator being present. Those are the points most likely to fall outside a control limit unobserved, and the hardest to defend afterward.
Build the record as you go. Five years of on-premises documentation is difficult to assemble retroactively. Log sheets, feed records, and test results should accumulate automatically as part of routine operation.
Confirm what your biocide is registered to claim. EPA finalized guidance and a test method in 2024 for antimicrobial products seeking efficacy claims against planktonic L. pneumophila in cooling tower water. Knowing what a product is registered to do, and what it is not, is part of a defensible program.
Smart Release® Generation 2 was designed around consistency of delivery. Solid biocide and inhibitor chemistry dissolves at a controlled rate into the recirculating system, producing a steadier residual than periodic liquid dosing and reducing the number of variables in play between service visits. Feed rates are set at the feeder and verified against tower conditions, so a control limit written into a water management program is one an operator can support with data rather than intent.
The all-solid format also shortens the chemical inventory in the mechanical room, which reduces the volume of concentrated liquid an EHS team has to store, label, and document alongside the water management program itself.
New Jersey is the first state to extend ASHRAE 188-style water management programs across this range of building types, and it is unlikely to be the last.
Programs built now to hold a control limit and produce a record will carry forward as other states follow.
Talk to our team about what a documented cooling tower control program looks like for your sites. Additionally, you can always check out our product catalog to see what we have to offer.