The Jersey City Independent "

All Photos by Steve Gold

“We need assurances, not just your word of mouth,” Randolph Avenue resident Joyce Willis said on Monday night, capturing the overarching sentiment in the City Council chambers as 33 people spoke during a public hearing on the city’s proposed settlement with PPG Industries to clean up a chromium-contaminated site on Garfield Avenue.

The proposed settlement, which was announced in February, calls for a cleanup to be overseen by a court-adminstered site administrator with the “goal” of a five-year time limit, in accordance with current standards laid out in a memo by former state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) head Lisa Jackson.

The city tried to sell the plan to the 150 or so people who packed the council chambers on Monday. Mayor Healy kicked things off, saying that the site has “laid nonproductive” as “an economic zero for the city” for decades, and that this settlement presented a great opportunity. Healy’s optimism was echoed by a slew of speakers: New Jersey deputy attorney general Anna Lascurain, Jersey City corporation counsel Bill Matsikoudis, PPG general counsel James Diggs, DEP assistant commissioner for site remediation Irene Kropp, and W. Michael McCabe, the former Environmental Protection Agency deputy administrator who has been asked to be the site administrator.

But to many residents and advocates, the settlement still suffers from a woeful lack of specifics. They say that while the cleanup scenario presented by the city and the state is a possible outcome of the settlement, they fear what might happen if any of the parties act with anything less than the best intentions in mind, pointing to the past actions of PPG and the DEP as a real cause for concern.

History of Neglect

The site on Garfield Avenue was abandoned by PPG in 1963, when the company shuttered the plant that produced chromium ore processing residue (COPR) there, including trivalent and hexavalent chromium.

Hexavalent chromium is known to cause lung cancer in humans, and has been linked to other types of cancer, including nasal, stomach and blood, in a number of studies. Trivalent chromium is more common, and while many consider it “safe,” many scientists say it can — and does — convert to hexavalent chromium in nature. A recent study by the state DEP found that the rate of lung cancer incidence near chromium sites was 7-17 percent higher than in other areas of Jersey City.

In a landmark 1990 Administrative Consent Order (ACO), the DEP ruled that PPG had to clean up the Garfield Avenue site and other sites around the county. The ACO found that conditions near the site “create[d] a substantial risk of imminent danger to human health and the environment.” The 26-page document laid out strict time guidelines for cleanup and assessed harsh penalties if PPG did not hit those deadlines accordingly.

But 19 years later, the Garfield Avenue site remains unremediated.

“This is 2009 and we’re just getting to this? What happened between then and now, and why has nothing been done?” Randolph Avenue resident Severn Willis asked, adding that those responsible for the inaction should face criminal prosecution.

“You are poisoning kids, adults — some children might not even grow up to be adults,” he said to PPG’s representatives attending the meeting.

Longtime residents and newcomers alike have struggled with the legacy of this industrial pollution in their neighborhood as the toxic site has languished, even after the 1990 ACO. While PPG’s Diggs boasted on Monday that his company had cleaned up 47 of the 61 sites named in the ACO, area residents talked of relatives who’ve died of lung cancer, fears for unborn children and grandchildren, and green liquid flowing through the streets on rainy days.

Many of those residents expressed anger and indignation at PPG, the multinational corporation worth several billion dollars that has fought tooth and nail to avoid cleaning up the site. But some advocates JCI has spoken with say that other players have let the site lay dormant as well.

“From my experience, the weak link in the chain may be the DEP,” Tom McKee tells us. McKee should know — he worked at the department for about 20 years before retiring in 2004, and he was an instrumental DEP representative in the research and negotiation of the 1990 ACO.

“They just don’t deliver,” he says of DEP. “There’s not enough follow-through as administrators and governors change to keep a big project on track [and] to make progress.”

This point echoes what the Interfaith Community Organization’s (ICO) Joe Morris told us in a previous story: “The legal instrument was never the problem. The will was the problem.” (ICO, along with the Natural Resources Defense Council, has filed a federal lawsuit calling for a cleanup that is still moving forward as this settlement plays out.)

At Monday’s meeting, the DEP’s Kropp said that the provisions of the 1990 ACO would remain binding under the new proposed settlement, and actually be “bolstered by” the settlement.

At the meeting, McKee questioned that assertion, noting that paragraph 57 of the proposed settlement seemed to contradict her. “DEP shall not assess stipulated penalties pursuant to Section E of the 1990 ACO,” the settlement reads. “You should be a little more honest,” McKee said.

Kropp responded that it only referred to grace period penalties, not all penalties. Reached a few days after the meeting, Matsikoudis tells JCI that the agreement “will be modified” to make that clearer.

Matsikoudis also maintains that the new settlement is much better than the ACO, since it comes “with the vast powers of enforcement vested in the Chancery Division, ranging from monetary awards to incarceration.”

Pushing for More in Settlement

While the residents’ demands for the settlement and cleanup are wide-ranging, several proposals have come to the fore.

One is the push for more extensive medical monitoring of local residents to determine the extent of illness spread by the chromium, and comprehensive treatment — paid for by PPG — when residents do fall ill.

The city seems to concur.

“Although there is a medical monitoring process in place, at our request, we believe that an enhanced medical monitoring of greater duration performed by an independent hospital is appropriate,” Matsikoudis tells JCI. “We will look at previous examples of how this was done and will have to arrive at language that is acceptable to PPG.”

A stickier issue is some residents’ request for stricter excavation standards than those currently guiding the settlement. Under the agreement, the term “applicable remedial provisions,” or the way in which the site will be cleaned up, is defined as “all applicable statutes regulations and laws including the DEP Commissioner’s Chromium Policy as it now exists or may be adopted in the future.”

The commissioner’s policy has been a big selling point for the city, as it has pointed out that it was the strictest in the nation and had been drafted by Lisa Jackson, who was tapped by President Obama to lead the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

Her policy, laid out in a February 2007 memo, dictates that for residential sites, “hexavalent chromium soil contamination in excess of 20 parts-per-million (ppm) is excavated to a depth of 20 feet.”

Critics say that is not deep and thorough enough.

“They need to dig well beyond 20 feet,” Felicia Collis, the presidents of the local community group GRACO (Garfield, Randolph, Arlington, Clerk, Claremont, Carteret, and Ocean) tells JCI, adding that the amount of chromium detected should also be well below 20 ppm. “There needs to be no detection at all.”

On Monday, Kropp alluded to a possible change in policy, saying that if the DEP adopts tougher regulations down the road, PPG would have to comply with them.

But what if the opposite happens?

Matsikoudis says not to worry about that. “We believe there is a likelihood that the standard will be made more strict,” he says.

But the DEP has not always increased the stringency of its guidelines. In 2004, Star-Ledger reporter Alexander Lane detailed how the DEP’s limit on hexavalent chromium went from 10 ppm to 6,100 ppm as PPG and other companies responsible for chromium pollution poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into lobbying the state for relaxed standards.

Since then, the statewide standard has been eliminated in favor of “site-specific” guidelines, and, as McKee points out, the 20 ppm to 20 feet standard could be changed at will. All a new commissioner would have to do is write a new memo, and “bingo, there’d be a new DEP commissioner policy,” he says.

A variety of other proposals were suggested by speakers on Monday, ranging from a bigger payment to the city (it is currently $1.25 million) to a community review board for the project to an increase in the percentage of Jersey City residents who will be trained and employed in the cleanup (currently 20 percent; there were calls to raise it to at least 40 percent).

But despite many concerns and suggestions levied about the settlement on Monday, there were several residents who spoke in strong support of the plan, noting that some action was better than none.

“Let’s get behind this and support it,” area resident Markis Abraham said. “It doesn’t need to be prolonged any more.”

Others agreed with the premise but offered a different solution.

“We’ve been waiting long enough for this; don’t rush it,” local artist and activist John Tichenor said. “Let’s get it right.”

Moving Forward

In the end, both residents and parties to the settlement acknowledged that Monday’s meeting was not the final word on the deal.

“As it stands, the settlement should not be endorsed,” GRACO’s Collis tells JCI, using a boxing metaphor to express her desire to see the city negotiate a better deal. “This is a ten-round fight, and only five rounds are done. The city needs to go an additional five rounds.”

While she eschewed metaphor, the DEP’s Kropp agreed with Collis’ sentiment.

“There is no done deal,” she said on Monday. “There is a lot of discussion that needs to happen going forward.”

To be part of that discussion, be sure to submit your comment to the DEP before the one-month public comment period ends on April 15. To do so, send mail to: Thomas Cozzi, Assistant Director, NJDEP, 401 East State St., PO Box 028, Trenton NJ 08625.

Once the public comment period is over, Matsikoudis says the city will consider which suggestions it will negotiate for. Then all parties will sit down again and work out an updated settlement. Eventually, the City Council will also have to approve the deal. Matsikoudis says that residents will get a say again before any new draft is adopted.

“The ultimate settlement provisions will be made public before the City Council votes,” he said. “The public will be heard before any vote.”

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