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Cleaning Up the Cleanup Process in New Jersey

Posted on: Monday, 3 April 2006, 21:00 CDT

By Alex Nussbaum, The Record, Hackensack, N.J.

Apr. 2--W.R. Grace & Co. closed its insulation factory in the heart of Hamilton Township 12 years ago and gave the site a clean bill of health.

Under new environmental cleanup rules designed to speed the reuse of industrial sites, state regulators took the company's word, never testing an ounce of the property outside of Trenton.

But there was contamination -- lots of it. Last year, town officials learned Grace had left behind 15,000 tons of soil riddled with extraordinarily high levels of asbestos.

"It's now not enough that a company steps forward and says, 'Here is a report from a licensed engineer." We've all learned the hard way that can't be trusted," Hamilton Mayor Glen Gilmore said. "We're a community that's been dumped on and lied to."

In a state with at least 14,000 contaminated sites -- a list that touches virtually every community -- critics say Hamilton may be just the tip of a toxic iceberg.

Across New Jersey, problems involving pollution cleanups have state lawmakers and environmental officials calling for sweeping reforms.

The tally of failed or controversial cleanups includes the old Ford Superfund site in Ringwood, dozens of chromium-laced hotspots in Secaucus and Jersey City, Edgewater's glitzy new waterfront developments, and the EnCap golf project in the Meadowlands.

In response, state lawmakers are considering bills that would impose criminal penalties on property owners and consultants who lie about cleanup results. They also want to require more public notice for local officials and neighbors of contaminated sites, and give the state Department of Environmental Protection more time to review claims that a site is uncontaminated.

The DEP's new commissioner, meanwhile, is discussing even broader changes, such as restoring the agency's ability to order more extensive cleanups at polluted sites.

"We need to go back to having the authority to demand a more rigorous cleanup," Lisa Jackson said. "We need to assure ourselves and, more importantly, the public that in our rush to redevelop we're not too quick to leave material in place."

Environmental groups have long accused the DEP of being too cozy with the polluters and developers it's supposed to police.

Business groups, however, are reacting cautiously. They say the state risks strangling a potent economic engine: the push to turn contaminated industrial sites, or "brownfields," into vibrant, tax-producing homes and shopping centers.

"You could stop the brownfields redevelopment in its tracks," warned Hal Bozarth of the Chemistry Council of New Jersey, an industry group whose members are responsible for pollution cleanups around the state. "You'd cost the redevelopers and people on the cleanup side of things millions and millions of dollars and return to where you were in the late '80s and '90s: a stalled, failed program."

Troubled cleanups, however, have increased the momentum for changes.

State officials signed off on four cleanups of Ford's old paint sludge in Ringwood, despite residents' complaints that the toxic material still littered their wooded enclave. The federal government oversaw the cleanups, but the state DEP had to approve the decision to take the site off the national Superfund list.

The Trenton school district closed down one school and is preparing to demolish two others under construction after learning that soil brought to the building site was laced with PCBs and petroleum byproducts.

In Secaucus, Jersey City and surrounding towns, a 2004 DEP report found potentially hazardous levels of chromium waste were left in the ground at nearly 200 sites. The waste was left after the department accepted industry-backed studies downplaying threats from the chemical.

In February 2005, a federal appeals court approved what could eventually become one of the nation's biggest toxic waste cleanups, the removal of 1.5 million tons of chromium slag from an old drive-in movie theater along Route 440 in Jersey City. In his decision, Circuit Judge Franklin Van Antwerpen said Honeywell International, the site owner, had taken advantage of a flawed state system.

"The evidence demonstrates a substantial breakdown in the agency process that has resulted in 20 years of permanent cleanup inaction," the judge wrote.

Other cleanups have also brought complaints. Some environmentalists have attacked the EnCap project, which would convert the Meadowlands' leaking landfills into golf courses, a hotel, and thousands of apartments and condos. The state is allowing developers to leave a toxic soup of chemicals underground that could bubble up and threaten future residents, those critics say. State officials deny the charges.

In Edgewater, builders have transformed the waterfront, once a mausoleum of shuttered factories, into luxury apartments, high-rises and shopping malls. But again, that has involved leaving some contaminants in place under a cap of pavement or asphalt, rather than removing pollutants once and for all.

Gene Heller, the developer responsible for much of Edgewater's rebirth, makes no apologies. Chemical levels there are too low, and too well-buried, to threaten anyone, he argued. He has no problem with punishing consultants who lie about cleanups. But adding more red tape to the process will only keep more sites more polluted, he said.

His City Place development, a mix of apartments and shops built atop buried asbestos, generates $3 million in annual property taxes, he argued.

"You have a lot of ratables, you have a lot of people living there and you have a lot of people working there, and who's being hurt?

"I always said I should get a medal instead of getting beat up by the DEP," he said.

State lawmakers in 1998 stripped the DEP of much of its power to order owners to remove polluted soil or groundwater. Instead, the department can only accept or reject alternatives chosen by the property owner or developer. The result, environmentalists complain, is a bias toward the cheapest remedy -- often to leave pollutants in place under a soil or asphalt cap instead of removing them.

The caps won't last forever, critics warn. And they could be breached by future owners unaware of the dangers left underground.

Policy changes and budget cuts have also left the department reliant on polluters and their consultants to design cleanups, test for chemical levels and certify that caps aren't breached, complained Bill Wolfe, a former DEP employee who now runs Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a Trenton watchdog group.

"When I built a house, I had the local building inspector come out twice and he personally witnessed my caulking," said Wolfe, a DEP policy analyst and planner for 13 years. "Yet we have multimillion-dollar cleanups with thousands of tons of contaminated soil and we have no one on site. The whole system is broken."

The new poster child for the system's failings is Hamilton, where asbestos isn't the only problem.

Last month, town officials were told that crushed concrete used as a roadbed at a planned housing development was tainted with cancer-causing PCBs. The concrete came from the demolition of the old Ford assembly plant in Edison. Adding to the insult, the state had known about the pollution since September but failed to notify locals for six months.

State and federal officials have opened criminal probes of both the asbestos and PCB incidents.

After W.R. Grace certified its plant as safe, the property was taken over by a document-shredding business. Federal and state officials say they haven't found evidence of asbestos-related illnesses among workers or in neighboring homes, despite soaring asbestos concentrations in the soil of up to 40 percent.

A federal cleanup of the site began last year and is due to resume this summer, Mayor Gilmore said.

At the housing development, construction has been halted while the town awaits the removal of some 5,600 tons of PCB-tainted fill. The material may have gone to as many as 10 other developments in Central Jersey, state officials say.

Gilmore, ironically, is state chair of the National Brownfield Association, a coalition of builders, consultants and government officials that encourages the reuse of contaminated sites. Now, he's warning mayors and councils in other towns that they need to hire their own consultants to keep track of the projects.

"We have been told that these are trace levels of PCBs that don't pose a real health threat," he said. "But my community has lost any confidence in what they're told by experts or officials because of this. And I can't blame them."

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Record, Hackensack, N.J.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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GRA,

Source: The Record - Hackensack, New Jersey

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