The last time officials with the Department of Environmental Protection went to Toms River, they heard from people who were angry about a proposed Natural Resource Damages settlement to remedy the Ciba-Geigy Superfund site. A month and a half later, the DEP was back Monday night in Toms River, as officials explained how the settlement would create open areas that have been cleaned up, and how BASF, the successor company to Ciba-Geigy, will continue to monitor and remediate any polluted groundwater.
“We’re relying on BASF to do the sampling, report the test results, and based upon that analysis, determine that that area around the EPA site, is clean enough. How do we know that that land is not injured?” asked William Skowronski of Ocean County Citizens for Clean Water.
“There are, plus or minus, 14,000 contaminated sites in New Jersey undergoing remediation right now. The department does not have the resources or the funding to go out and independently sample, or use a third party to do that sampling. We rely on these licensed site remediation professionals,” said David Haymes, assistant commissioner for DEP.
Toms River mayor, Maurice Hill, said, “This is a bad deal. We were never involved in the negotiations on this Natural Resource Damage settlement. We were lectured to. We never saw the Natural Resource Damage assessment in dollars and cents.”
The DEP is taking public comments until April 5 on the settlement plan. DEP officials said that if the proposal falls apart, and they go to court, there’s a chance Toms River will have to wait for any benefits, and those could turn out to be less than what’s in the current proposal.
