By Brenda Flanagan
Correspondent
“The money will not be there. It’s gonna be spent and gone,” said Debbie Mans.
Environmentalists like Bay Keeper Debbie Mans vented, upset over apparent plans to divert millions intended to restore the polluted Passaic River to help balance New Jersey’s beleaguered state budget, instead.
“I think it’s just unfair to those communities that have suffered through the damage,” Mans said.
This waterway’s toxic — contaminated with deadly carcinogens from Diamond Alkali, an old riverside chemical plant in Newark.
Currently, a tentative court settlement with the Superfund site’s new owner would provide $190 million to restore the river’s habitat — following EPA cleanup — dredging tons of river bottom laced with carcinogens. But the Christie administration’s looking to take 74 percent of the settlement money, leaving $50 million for the river.
“That just means there’s a lot less money to say OK, once we’ve taken the contaminated sediments out, how do we return this river truly back to the community?” Mans asked.
“The legislature was not complicit with him stealing that money for the general budget purpose,” said Sen. Bob Smith.
Smith wrote a budget resolution to reserve at least $120 million of the Diamond Alkali settlement for restoring the river. But Gov. Christie used the line-item veto to delete Smith’s proposed restrictions.
“All governors are crooks in the very technical sense: they’re not doing criminal acts where they’re stealing money, but they very frequently take money — dedicated funds — and use it for other purposes,” Smith said.
Take the tobacco settlement — literally. Governors in several states — including former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey — cut deals to take big chunks of settlement money up front — a couple billion bucks. It went into the general fund, another one-shot cash infusion that ratings houses like Standard & Poor’s deplore.
“I think it’s very short-sighted on his part and I think it sets a terrible precedent for the future because future governors will say, ‘He did it. Why can’t I?'” Smith said.
The Governor’s office had no comment. New Jersey’s Attorney General’s Office emphasize the EPA oversees actually cleanup and recovers the funds to pay for it. Lee Moore noted, “Settlement payments to New Jersey resulting from the State’s own lawsuits against the parties supplement the cleanup…New Jersey has been in litigation over pollution of the Passaic River for nine years (and) has recovered the $153 million it expended during its decades of exhaustive legal and environmental effort on behalf of the River.”
As for the Passaic, we found some new signs posted here in different languages, warning people people not to eat the crabs they catch here. Environmentalists say in any language, diverting money away from cleaning up this resource is wrong.