Source: http://www.nj.com, May 12, 2015
By: S.P. Sullivan
Experts hired by the state to calculate environmental damage at a former Exxon Mobil industrial site in Gloucester County put the price tag for decades of pollution at over $80 million, newly-released documents show.
The release of reports on contamination at the Paulsboro petroleum terminal has become more fodder in the fight over a controversial settlement between Gov. Chris Christie’s administration and the oil giant.
“It raises more questions than it settles,” said Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club. “The deal gets worse each time we get more information.”
The expert reports made public this week chronicle decades of pollution and tally up its multi-million dollar impact on groundwater in the area. But ultimately, environmental consultants hired by the state found only a fraction of that cost — less than $15 million — could be attributed to Exxon, which operated the Paulsboro terminal site from the 1950s into the early 90s.
The disclosure comes as environmentalists and Gov. Chris Christie’s opponents in the legislature are demanding more details about the Exxon settlement.
The deal, which started with a lawsuit over so-called “natural resource damages” for pollution at refineries in Union and Hudson counties, has grown to include similar claims at the Paulsboro terminal, 15 other industrial sites and hundreds of gas stations across New Jersey.
Christie has praised the agreement as the largest of its kind in state history, one that would require Exxon to pay $225 million for contaminating the sites on top of ongoing remedial cleanups, though the company admits no wrongdoing.
A judge is expected to rule in the case after a 60-day public comment period ends in June.
Critics have been calling on the state to reject the deal because it claimed at trial last year that taxpayers were owed $8.9 billion in damages for the two refineries, known as Bayway and Bayonne. They also say state officials haven’t done enough to determine how much taxpayers are owed for the pollution at the other sites.
“They’re still leaving a lot of money on the table,” said state Sen. Ray Lesniak (D-Union), a vocal critic of the deal who has been seeking documents related to the case.
The Paulsboro documents, which include five expert reports totaling hundreds of pages, were released after inquiries from Lesniak and Assemblyman John McKeon (D-Essex), who has also been examining the settlement.
In April, administration officials said in a statement that the state had valued the damage at Paulsboro and the other 15 facilities tacked onto the deal at about $5 million, “making the value of any potential future recovery far outweighed by the cost to taxpayers to litigate these minor claims.”
State officials have not explained how they calculated that $5 million figure, saying it could undermine their legal position in a case that hasn’t formally closed.
The state has lost two other natural resource damage cases that it brought to trial, and some Republicans in the legislature have said any legal action against Exxon is risky.
“The state could have ended up with nothing” if it had waited for the judge to rule at trial, said Assemblyman Michael Patrick Carroll (R-Morris) during a recent Assembly Judiciary hearing on the deal.
McKeon, who heads that committee, said Tuesday that the expert reports show the state was on solid ground, and was prepared to go to court over the South Jersey site as recently as 2009.
“The DEP only does external reports like this when they’re ready to go to litigation,” McKeon told NJ Advance Media. “That makes Paulsboro a significant site.”

LEGACY OF CONTAMINATION

The documents concern groundwater contamination at a 34-acre oil and gas terminal along the banks of the Delaware river. In the 1950s and 60s, one report said, petroleum tank bottoms were discarded in unlined disposal pits, where harmful contaminants including benzene, toluene and lead were left to seep into the soil.
That waste, combined with leaks and spills over several decades, caused “widespread groundwater contamination” in the order of hundreds of millions of gallons, the report found.
The cost of undoing all that damage, according to two expert reports from 2009, would top $81 million. Adding in “compensatory restoration” — environmental projects to compensate the public for decades of pollution — would mean another $3.2 million.

But after the state settled with two other “defendant groups” that operated at the site for $1.1 million in 2011, it asked its consultants — Colorado-based Stratus Consulting and Maryland-based Papadopulos & Associates — to limit the scope of their findings to the 40 years Exxon owned the site, according to a letter sent by acting Attorney General John Hoffman and DEP Commissioner Bob Martin to McKeon and Lesniak late last week.
The revised reports, drafted in 2013, assessed the damage “attributable solely to Exxon’s tenure” at less than $14.5 million.
“There’s clearly a long legacy of contamination at Paulsboro,” said Doug O’Malley, director of Environment New Jersey, which has been trying to document air and water quality issues at the site. “They certainly don’t do it justice.”

Those costs are in addition to ongoing remedial cleanups at the site, and Martin and Hoffman said in their letter that the polluters “must spend whatever the ultimate cleanup cost proves to be.”
But environmental advocates say that approach, which could allow for capping pollutants in place, will be far less than the full-scale restoration called for in the expert reports.
“They are using the same magic wand that makes corporate polluters’ liabilities disappear,” said Tittel, of the Sierra Club. “With the wave of their hand, Exxon saves millions of dollars.”
A spokesman for the Attorney General’s office said Tuesday it was still reviewing a written inquiry from NJ Advance Media. An Exxon spokesman declined comment.