Jersey City Community Group Joins Federal Suit Against PPG
By Jon Whiten • Jul 6th, 2009 • Category: Blog, News
In the wake of the city’s final approval of the settlement it, along with the state, negotiated with PPG Industries to clean up chromium-contaminated land along Garfield Avenue and in other spots around the city, the community group GRACO announced today that it is joining the federal lawsuit against PPG brought by the Interfaith Community Organization (ICO) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
GRACO’s members had hoped the settlement would quell its concerns about the cleanup, and the group’s leaders and attorneys worked with city and state officials through the settlement process to ask that specific measures be included in the final document. But they remain unconvinced that the settlement is the best way to protect public health.
“GRACO has concluded that the best and fastest way to protect the health of residents in this neighborhood is to join ICO and NRDC in their federal lawsuit,” Felicia Collis, the group’s president, says. “State and local government have allowed our rights to be violated by PPG. Through this lawsuit, we are demanding that those rights be assured.”
The lawsuit, filed this February in federal district court in Newark, is brought under the citizens’ suit provision of the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. The court is slated to receive PPG’s response to the suit tomorrow.
Jersey City corporation counsel Bill Matsikoudis stands by the settlement he helped negotiate, and says there’s no reason to think ICO and NRDC are the only groups who can force PPG to implement a proper and thorough cleanup.
“[They're] saying they are the only entities to trust to ensure the cleanup, as if the city, [state] attorney general, DEP, [site administrator] Mike McCabe and Judge Olivieri should not be trusted,” he says. “Our agreement is now a court order that requires PPG to remediate the 20 sites to the strictest standards in the country pursuant to a five-year schedule.”
But the parties to the federal suit maintain that the settlement still fails to guarantee a permanent and protective cleanup of the site.
“This settlement is an attempt to put a new sell-by date on a package that spoiled years ago,” ICO chromium cleanup project director Joe Morris says.
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Jon Whiten is the founding editor of the Jersey City Independent; he now works for a public-policy nonprofit in Trenton.
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