Workers will use a drill rig mounted to a pickup truck to collect soil samples at the chromium-contaminated site on Garfield Avenue today, weather permitting. The work is expected to take one day only.

The samples will be taken from about four feet below the ground, and then a New Jersey-certified lab will analyze the samples to determine the extent of the chromium contamination at the site. That information will be used to plot further cleanup activities at the site.

The main concerns outlined in the letters are ones JCI has reported on over the past few months: the extent of excavation, medical monitoring of residents, the financial settlement, the timetable and the enforcement mechanism in the deal.

The city and the state are currently negotiating to add several provisions to the initial draft settlement, based in part on public input during the process, with PPG. At last week’s City Council meeting, corporation counsel Bill Matsikoudis said the revised settlement could be completed in the next few weeks, depending on how the negotiations go.

Meanwhile, a question mark hangs over the extent of the cleanup proposed in the draft settlement, as DEP documents were recently uncovered that show the state’s current chromium cleanup standard is inadequate. The DEP is reviewing the documents and deciding if it will tighten the standards.

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.”

- GRACO is holding a 3 pm rally at 900 Garfield Ave. today to call for a more comprehensive cleanup of the chromium-contaminated site.

- In an omnibus column, the Insider trots out a legitimate criticism of Mayor Healy’s refusal to appear at the April 1 debate. He also reports that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg will host a campaign fundraiser for Healy next month, and that Ward B Councilwoman Mary Spinello’s resignation was a result of her vote on the AMB warehouse project, which he says invoked the ire of her constituents.

- A second arrest was made in the murder of Elisha “Elijah” Benjamin, who was shot and killed in January while working in a Greenville bodega. Cops say they picked up the getaway driver, but are still looking for the shooter.

- The dead woman found Thursday morning in the Skyway Motel has been identified by police.

- Irene Williams, who was pictured on the cover of Friday’s Journal ostensibly reacting to a shooting near her home in Greenville, took exception to the paper’s use of her image. She wishes to make it clear that neither she nor her family was involved in the shooting, a fact she says she was confirming with police when her picture was taken.

- The Times points to construction on 225 Grand and Monaco Towers as some of the “signs of life in the housing market,” before pointing out that “several other high-profile projects planned for Jersey City are proceeding with less alacrity,” namely the second tower at Trump Plaza, the Rem Koolhaus-designed 111 1st St. and Provost Square, the controversial Toll Brothers project in the Powerhouse Arts District.

- The date for the trial of Susan Kolb’s dogs has been set at May 8.

- Rounding out yesterday’s trial news, Dwayne Wilson, who is accused of murdering his sister and two of her children in 2005, was diagnosed with dissociative personality disorder, more commonly known as multiple personalities. Both the prosecution and the defense agreed with the diagnosis; Wilson may be found not guilty by reason of insanity at a later hearing.

- Jersey City’s Naimah Terry has been selected as this year’s Cherry Blossom Princess by the NJ State Society.

- As part of ongoing construction to repair the dilapidated structure, there will be lane closures on the Pulaski Skyway this month.

In statewide news:

- The federal government has awarded New Jersey nearly $207 million to bolster its unemployment insurance fund, making it the first state to receive funds to help the jobless under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

- The state’s public advocate says the state’s psychiatric hospitals are in need of more qualified and better trained staff.

On Feb. 19, the city and the state announced, to great fanfare, that it had reached a settlement with PPG Industries, Inc. to clean up chromium along Garfield Avenue. “TOXINS BE GONE” screamed the headline on the next day’s Jersey Journal.

“This settlement will give residents the peace of mind and better quality of life that comes with a cleaner, healthier neighborhood,” acting Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) commissioner Mark Mauriello said in a press release.

But as the settlement entered a one-month public comment period this week, many community members and environmental advocates say it isn’t tough enough, and some are continuing their own fights against what they call a rogue polluter.

Chromium’s Dirty Legacy

The chromium plant located on Garfield Avenue began operation in 1924, refining raw chromium ore into paint pigment and other items 24 hours a day. PPG purchased the facility in 1954 and ran it until its closing in the fall of 1963. Since then, it has sat largely untouched, a toxic hazard for the Jersey City residents who live or work near it.

Nearly three million tons of chromium ore processing residue (COPR) was produced at Hudson County’s three plants (one was located in Kearny), according to the DEP. Much of this COPR was given away to developers to use as fill material during construction in the 1950s and 60s.

The COPR produced by the sites includes chromium of the trivalent and hexavalent kind. 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.

Joe Morris is a veteran of local battles over chromium. As the director of the chromium cleanup project for the Interfaith Community Organization (ICO), he has fought to implement strict environmental standards for chromium cleanups in Jersey City. Most notably, a lawsuit won by ICO in 2003 forced Honeywell International Corporation to commit $400 million to clean up a 34-acre site along the Hackensack River banks, where companies dumped the same toxic waste as on Garfield Avenue.

In early February, ICO, along with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) filed a citizens’ lawsuit against PPG in federal court to compel the cleanup of the Garfield Avenue site.

“We were really hoping that the city’s agreement would put [our lawsuit] out of business,” Morris says. “It looks like it won’t.”

Calling the settlement “toothless,” Morris says that “other than a five-year goal, it has no timetable, no sanctions, no penalties.”

NRDC attorney Nancy Marks agrees.

“After 25 years of not cleaning up, there’s nothing in the settlement that shows us the cleanup will actually go forward,” she says.

Jersey City’s lead attorney Bill Matsikoudis says that notion is false, noting that a more detailed schedule will be put together once the settlement is formally adopted.

“This is not a remedial action work plan,” he says. “It sets up a procedure.” He adds that any of the parties can also go to court if one is not holding up its end of the bargain.

The settlement, jointly negotiated by the city and the state, calls for PPG to remediate the Garfield Avenue contamination “as expeditiously as possible with a five-year goal for completion” and pay $1 million into the city’s Environmental Trust Fund. In turn, that money must be used “to fund an environmentally beneficial project, such as the acquisition of property for open space or the development and/or improvement of a public park.”

Both Marks and Morris say that the current proposed settlement is weaker than an agreement already in place.

“It actually weakens the environmental cleanup,” Morris says. A 1990 Administrative Consent Order (ACO) issued by the DEP had real enforcement measures, he notes. For example, if PPG fell behind in the cleanup, the DEP could assess penalties under the ACO.

So what happened?

According to Morris, PPG and the other chemical companies’ intense lobbying efforts to change state cleanup standards, well-documented by the Star-Ledger five years ago, “sapped the will of the DEP” to enforce the 1990 ACO. Former DEP case manager Frank Faranca told the Star-Ledger in 2004 that the companies used a variety of stalling tactics, like submitting flawed plans and dragging out cleanups while waiting for standards to become more lax.

“The legal instrument was never the problem,” Morris says. “The will was the problem.”

Matsikoudis says that this settlement “is far superior to the ACO,” in part because it will be “an enforceable court order,” but Morris is quick to point out that the ACO was also “explicitly enforceable in court.” The problem, he says, was that the state never went to court to enforce it, and when it did, PPG deflected enforcement orders.

Community Groups Also Wary

Morris and the NRDC aren’t the only ones up in arms over the proposed settlement.

“Jersey City is selling out the current and future residents of Ward F for $1 million,” Robert Harper says. As the director of the Garfield Avenue Chromium Coalition, Harper has been following the potential settlement with great interest.

“PPG doesn’t want to really clean it up,” he says. “They’ve played games in court and with the DEP for decades. It’s beyond criminal.”

He compared the lack of action by PPG to combat the toxic chromium to the infamous U.S. Public Health Service studies on poor Southern blacks that studied the effects of syphilis.

“We’ve got a modern-day Tuskegee Experiment going on in Ward F,” he says. “There should be people running around in hazmat suits over here.”

Ed Vergara of the community group known as GRACO (Garfield, Randolph, Arlington, Clerk, Claremont, Carteret, and Ocean) agrees that more action needs to be taken. He says the settlement is “bogus,” which is why his organization retained environmental lawyer Stuart Lieberman to look into its own course of legal action.

Earlier this month, Lieberman and GRACO announced they were filing suit in state court to expedite the cleanup, but after a meeting with officials from the city, the DEP and PPG on Monday, Lieberman says he is putting the suit on hold for 30 days.

“The city deserves credit” for doing something at the site after so many years of no action, he says. He is hoping to work some of the things he and GRACO are looking for — like more extensive medical monitoring of residents close to chromium sites and guarantees that the settlement money go to the community around 900 Garfield Ave. — into the city’s settlement during the 30-day public comment period.

Matsikoudis says that some medical monitoring is already in place (see related blog post), but he “remains open to a more expansive medical monitoring procedure.” He also says the city “will negotiate with the communities on how to distribute the funds,” adding that he “tried like hell” to get the city more than $1 million but faced an uphill climb considering the current economic conditions.

Morris, who also met with the city, the DEP and PPG on Monday, left the meeting less optimistic than Lieberman.

“I didn’t hear anything that was reassuring,” he says. “The refrain was ‘trust us.’ After this many years, ‘trust us’ is not a strategy.”

A Question of Standards

Even if the Garfield Avenue site is cleaned up in a timely manner in accordance with state DEP guidelines — a big if, according to critics — some argue that still may not be good enough for public health.

The DEP no longer has statewide cleanup standards, but relies on site-specific standards based on how much chromium is deemed to be present at a given site.

Matsikoudis says that the Garfield Avenue site will be cleaned up to the standard of no more than 20 parts-per-million down to 20 feet, a standard put in place by former DEP head Lisa Jackson. He adds that it will include no capping — the practice of simply “covering up” chromium waste by various mechanisms.

Morris says that 20 feet down is not nearly enough, because there are “very high levels of chromium below that at the Garfield Avenue site.”

Proper cleanup of the site is especially important, Harper notes, because the recently-approved Canal Crossing Redevelopment Plan Area includes residential zoning at the Garfield Avenue site that is the epicenter of the chromium problem.

For now, the city and the state have tapped former Environmental Protection Agency deputy administrator W. Michael McCabe as the site administrator for Garfield Avenue.

McCabe says that while he’s “inclined to take the job,” he wants to “gauge the level of community support” before formally accepting the offer.

“I’ve seen communities where they’re never able to get beyond the oppositional politics that paralyzes movement forward,” he says. “If that’s what this is about, life’s too short.”

McCabe explains that he understands residents’ frustrations — after all, they’ve seen a toxic site sit untouched for decades. He simply hopes that people are willing to work constructively towards the end goal of cleaning up the site.

He says he has full confidence that the settlement will end in a thorough and safe cleanup.

“I wouldn’t take the position unless I thought that was absolutely the case,” he says. “I’m not going to put my reputation on the line to do a halfway job.”

While admitting that McCabe comes to this task with an impressive history, Morris argues that in the end, it doesn’t really matter.

“A resume is not a cleanup plan,” he says. “It’s neither here nor there.” He notes that former U.S. Sen. Robert Torricelli has done a “very good job” as the court-appointed special master of the Honeywell site, despite having no experience in environmental cleanup.

For Garfield Avenue, Morris says the plan — not the person administering it — is what is important, and in its current form the plan is just too vague.

“You could have Barack Obama as the site administrator,” he says, “and we don’t know if anything would happen.”

After the public hearing, the settlement will have to go to the City Council for approval.  “When that happens depends upon the level of public comment and potential modification to the document,” Matsikoudis says. “If we collectively agree to make changes based upon public comment, that drafting period may take a while.”

- Jersey City is hoping that former EPA deputy administrator W. Michael McCabe will be the site administrator for the cleanup of toxic chromium waste near 900 Garfield Ave. The city and state settled last month with PPG Industries on a preliminary site cleanup plan. Other suits against PPG are still moving forward, though, as many community members don’t think the settlement goes far enough. Look for JCI‘s report on the cleanup tomorrow.

- In an op-ed, JCPD Sgt. Ed Carattini argues that the city’s police and firefighters — especially in management positions — do not accurately reflect the diversity of the city.

- Six HudCo residents — including three from Jersey City — have been indicted on charges they operated a credit card fraud and identity theft ring.

- The financial pressure being applied on the Jersey Journal by owner Advance Publications partly has to do with the fact that other, more-profitable arms of the media conglomerate are no longer quite as profitable, and thus aren’t able to prop up a paper that reportedly loses money each year. In the latest woeful news to come out of Advance, Advertising Age reports that more cuts are coming to the company’s Conde Nast Media Group.

- Art critic Dan Bischoff reviews the “Industrial Strength: Precisionism and New Jersey” exhibit that opens at the Jersey City Museum on Thursday night. In an interesting passage, he compares contemporary artists that fetishize Jersey’s industrial ruin with the Precisionists: “Contemporary painters are most often attracted by the spread of industrial rot, with its views of abandoned factories and the rusting machine plants left over from the boom days of World War II, while Precisionists were in awe of America’s productive capacity and tended to fit their industrial silhouettes into simplified, almost Cubist, patterns.”

- The Jersey City Medical Center has unveiled a new mural in its pediatric waiting room, courtesy of Bayonne’s Jamile Borges.

In statewide news:

- Many South Jersey municipalities are deciding against deferring half of their state pension obligations this year, fearful of heavier debts down the road.

- The New Jersey Council on the Arts has released the guidelines for its Staffing Preservation program, which is expected to distribute $336,900 in federal stimulus money to NJ arts organizations to support positions that have been eliminated or targeted for elimination/reduction of hours.

- In a test run, a slurry of microscopic iron particles will be pumped into the ground at an old industrial park in Passaic to neutralize a plume of toxic pollution. If it works, the process could be used to clean up a wide variety of contamination, including solvents, pesticides, PCBs and heavy metals.

- The state Supreme Court has rejected a Republican effort to force Gov. Corzine to release email exchanges with former girlfriend Carla Katz, who was president of the largest state workers’ union.

- The fight over building a strip mall in the Palisades in North Bergen has been officially tabled by the Hudson County Planning Board.

- The state sued Verizon yesterday over its alleged “deceptive and misleading” marketing practices for its FiOS service.

- NJ home prices are dropping by an average of about 1 percent a month, and will likely not stabilize before the fourth quarter, appraiser Jeffrey Otteau says. He predicted a 9 percent decline in prices for 2009 overall.

- The EPA is calling for the immediate closing of three waterfront sites along the Raritan Bay in Old Bridge and Sayreville due to health concerns after finding high levels of lead in the area.

- Will the recession slow the state’s open space purchases?

- The state has extended payment of accidental death benefits to survivors of public employees who die while serving on active duty in the military.

- Doubts are mounting about a 2009 opening date for the beleaguered Xanadu project in the Meadowlands.