Green Jersey

DEP: Let’s clean up this mess

(Environmentalists: Get moving already.)

At a joint meeting of the state Senate and Assembly environmental committees yesterday, the DEP offered proposals to help speed the cleanup of 22,000 polluted sites.

One proposal: To hire private firms to perform two-thirds of the cleanup work, the Bergen Record is reporting. A similar plan in Massachusetts has successfully reduced that state’s backlog of polluted sites, according to assistant DEP commissioner Irene Kropp. (See the Record’s story for a list of “active sites” with known contamination.)

Other proposals, via the Star-Ledger: The DEP should be able to set a timeframe for cleanup, establish a “one call” permitting system, levy a 1 percent surcharge on polluters to raise money for the Remediation Guarantee Fund, encourage the development of urban brownfields, supervise formerly polluted sites that are proposed for use as schools, child-care centers or houses, give more state aid for the removal of residential underground storage tanks, and help finance the cleanup of pollution related to dry-cleaning businesses. Kropp also called for environmental consultants, who would supervise cleanups in place of DEP staff, to be licensed.

The Sierra Club yesterday issued a press release demanding that the site remediation program be reformed and strengthened. In it, executive director Jeff Tittel says the program has become more about promoting development than actually cleaning sites.

The group said the document was the same as one it sent out a year ago — “both a result of and an illustration of the fact that nothing has been done to move us forward with regard to site remediation in the last 12 months.”

The mess we’re in, from the Star-Ledger:

The number of polluted sites grew by 4,000 in the past year, according to DEP Commissioner Lisa Jackson. Among the 22,000 sites, 4,000 have not been cleaned up for at least a decade and at least 3,500 have pollutants leaking into water sources.