State Taken to Task Over School Sites
By Jeff Pillets, The Record, Hackensack, N.J.
May 4–Angry lawmakers from both parties are calling on the state to stop building public schools on polluted sites — a tactic of the troubled New Jersey Schools Construction Corp.
“The very idea that New Jersey is deliberately sending our schoolchildren to the worst possible places takes my breath away,” said Sen. Barbara Buono, a Democrat from Edison. “There is nothing more important than this.”
Buono, in an interview Wednesday, said she was aghast to learn that the SCC and state Department of Environmental Protection signed an unpublicized agreement in 2003 to fast-track permits for the construction of schools. Critics say the agreement, first reported by The Record last month, jeopardizes children by shortening regulatory review times to 30 days in some cases.
During budget hearings in recent days, leading lawmakers such as Buono and Assemblymen Joseph Cryan, Louis Greenwald and Joseph Malone have called state education and environmental officials to task. The lawmakers argued that nothing short of a freeze on all school construction at polluted sites would suffice.
Malone, a Burlington County Republican, says criminal prosecutions may be in order for officials who promoted construction on tainted sites without fully investigating ground and water contamination.
The Record reported last week that SCC officials spent millions planning to build a 1,700-student high school in a contaminated Union City mill that had once produced uranium for the Manhattan Project. The SCC ultimately abandoned the project last year not for environmental reasons, but because the agency’s $8.6 billion reserves had been spent on what state investigators described as a four-year spree of “unaccountability and waste.”
“We’ve come to expect the worst out of this agency,” Malone said. “But when you hear that they’re deliberately putting our children in harm’s way, it makes you lose all faith. You would think that standards for our children and schools would be the absolute highest — not the lowest.”
The SCC did not respond to phone calls for this article.
In April 2005, state Inspector General Mary Jane Cooper issued a preliminary report that found the SCC was building on tainted land that was “patently unsuitable” for schools. While Cooper’s report names no specific school sites, by some estimates, the SCC has acquired more than 60 tainted pieces of land across the state.
Leading environmental groups are now calling for an emergency halt on all land acquisition and construction until new standards for site selection and public input are developed.
In an April 26 letter to Governor Corzine, New Jersey Sierra Club Director Jeff Tittel outlined a six-point emergency plan to guide future school projects. In addition to freezing construction at all contaminated sites, the plan calls for new standards for land acquisition and comprehensive soil and water monitoring at schools already built on polluted parcels.
The environmentalists also want the state to mandate public hearings on future school projects. In Union City, residents near the former Manhattan Project site first learned of plans for a new high school in letters from the SCC warning them of eventual eviction and eminent domain proceedings.
“But this is not just the state’s problem,” Tittel said. “Local officials have been all too willing to pawn off their worst properties for new schools and save ratable land for fat-cat developers.”
In Gloucester City, Tittel pointed out, local officials even chose to build a new school on a federal Superfund site. “Our children in urban areas have already been shortchanged in the quality of education they are receiving with compared to the suburbs,” Tittel said. “It is wrong for us to be also risking their health when we send them to school.
DEP spokeswoman Elaine Makatura said reviewing school siting standards is now “a top priority” for the agency and its commissioner, Lisa Jackson. She said officials at both the DEP and SCC are working to review the 2003 fast-track agreement. “There will be substantial changes,” she said.
There are other signs that the Corzine administration is seeking to make a clean break from at least some of the environmental policies of the two previous Democratic administrations that have ruled Trenton since 2002.
The state announced last week that it would support efforts by the Trenton Board of Education to tear down a partially completed public school in the North Ward where contaminated soil had been found. School officials, who had filed suit against the SCC to stop the middle school project, said their previous complaints to the state fell on deaf ears.
“We tried for months and months just to get a meeting with top people at the SCC and DEP and we were completely ignored,” said Robert Revelle, the school board president. “It was like our whole community had been forsaken by these state agencies. Now it seems they’re listening.”
Revelle said the Corzine administration has promised to foot the bill to demolish the school and remove all the tainted soil. Some estimates for the work range as high as $20 million.
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