Source: http://www.northjersey.com, February 8, 2015
By: Lindsey Kelleher
Borough officials are working to ensure that the $95,000 the town is paying in a settlement for cleaning up pollution in the Passaic River does not have an impact on residents.
The Totowa mayor and council approved paying the money for the settlement to the State of New Jersey during its Jan. 27 meeting.
Originally the state was supposed to take the $95,000 for Totowa’s share of the lawsuit out of the borough’s state aid but since the state neglected to do that, the borough will be writing a check for the money, which will come out of the 2015 municipal budget, according to Mayor John Coiro.
Coiro said the $95,000 will be included as an expense in this year’s budget, which he and the council will put together later this year.
“We will work it through and try to minimize the effect it has on the taxpayers,” Coiro told Passaic Valley Today last week.
The lawsuit comes from past court rulings in which New Jersey Superior Court Judge Sebastian P. Lombardi determined that Occidental Chemical Corp., Tierra Solutions, Inc., and Maxus Energy Corporation are responsible for past and future clean-up costs for the river.
Tierra and Maxus then sued 70 municipalities and other public entities because they argued that they have been polluting the river for the past two centuries.
The case began in 2005 when the state launched litigation against Occidental and other companies associated with the former Diamond Shamrock site in Newark. The Shamrock site manufactured pesticides and herbicides in the 40s, 50s and 60s, including the dioxin Agent Orange, which was used during the Vietnam War. Occidental, the primary defendant in the case, is accused of dumping dioxin and other chemicals into the river.
This past December, Judge Lombardi entered the consent judgment requiring Occidental to pay the state $190 million to resolve its liability for certain economic damages, natural resource damages, and past clean-up and removal costs related to contamination of the river, according to an announcement from the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office.
The Occidental consent judgment represents the final settlement in the state’s decade-long battle to recover the public’s costs and damages arising from contamination at the Newark site, according to the statement. So far $355.4 million has been recovered by the state in the litigation.
According to the Attorney General’s Office, the state will be working closely with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to start the clean-up project as soon as possible.
New Jersey Acting Attorney General John J. Hoffman called this settlement as well as two others that preceded it “a tremendous victory” for residents.
State Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Bob Martin said in the announcement, “Cleaning up the lower Passaic River is a top environmental priority for New Jersey, one that is vital to the health and safety of people who live and work along the river and who have long had to bear the burden of this pollution.”
The Occidental consent judgment resolves the state’s claims for past costs and damages in the litigation, although the clean-up obligations continue and will be enforced by the EPA under the federal Superfund process, according to the announcement.
Since 2005, special counsel from Jackson Gilmour & Dobbs, PC of Houston, Texas and Gordon & Gordon, PC, of Springfield have represented the state’s interests in the river litigation.
In Other Council News
The council held first readings for four ordinance changes. A public hearing on the ordinance changes is scheduled for Tuesday, Feb. 10, at 8 p.m., in borough hall, 537 Totowa Rd.
One ordinance change is for increasing municipal employees’ salaries by 2 percent, which is the same salary increase they received last year.
An ordinance related to the duties of the Totowa First Aid Squad is another that could be amended at the Feb. 10 meeting. The ordinance will be amended to include CPR training requirements for the squad and will have verbiage about how the squad’s director is expected to communicate with the New Jersey Office of Emergency Management during emergency situations. Coiro explained the squad is already doing these duties but that the ordinance’s verbiage will be updated to reflect this.
Another ordinance is for abolishing the borough’s parking authority. The authority was established 20 years ago to review areas around the municipality for installing parking meters and the amount of money it would cost to park. However, the authority hasn’t installed meters or held meetings about the task.
According to Coiro, borough officials do not intend to install meters in the immediate future.
The last ordinance is regarding the road opening permits companies such as Verizon, Cablevision and other contractors receive when they need to open roadways in the borough for completing work.
The borough charges these companies a fee for opening the roads because it needs to make sure these companies close and properly repave the section of road it opened and clean-up after the work is completed.
The ordinance change will take the fee contractors are currently charged by the amount of cubic feet of road they need to rip open and recalibrate it from cubic foot to square foot.