Work on contaminated ground water in Rocky Hill and Montgomery affected.
By: Steve Rauscher
Funding for a pair of Superfund sites in Montgomery Township and Rocky Hill will not be available this year, after the Environmental Protection Agency announced it was cutting Superfund expenditures by more than $200 million.
The Superfund program was launched in 1980 to identify, monitor and clean up hazardous environmental contamination two years after the presence of trichloroethylene, a common industrial solvent and carcinogen, was discovered in the Rocky Hill municipal well and in nearby private wells on and around Sycamore Lane in Montgomery Township. The two sites were among the first to come under Superfund supervision.
There are now 263 Superfund sites in New Jersey, 20 alone in Somerset County. EPA caseworkers had planned to request $2.5 million in federal money to fund the redesign of a remediation, or cleanup, plan for the Montgomery and Rocky Hill sites. But because of the need to cut expenditures, the request has been postponed until 2003, according to an EPA spokesman Rich Cahill.
A state Department of Environmental Protection spokesman predicted the fund could experience similar budget constraints next year.
The original funding for the Superfund program came from a tax on oil and chemical companies, levied because such companies were often the source of the contamination. In the late 1990s, Congress failed to extend the tax, and it expired. The Superfund program has been losing money ever since.
The announcement Monday that the Bush administration was cutting Superfund expenditures in half prompted outrage and recriminations from both political parties. Rep. Mike Ferguson (R-7), in whose district the Montgomery and Rocky Hill sites lie, condemned former Democratic President Bill Clinton, who he said allowed the Superfund tax to expire while in office, while DEP Commissioner Bradley Campbell slammed the Bush administration in a statement for failing to support the re-extension of the Superfund tax.
"In an all too familiar move, the Bush administration has once again decided to sacrifice protections of public health and environment in New Jersey for the sake of a narrow class of polluting industries," Mr. Campbell said.
Both appeared to agree that the tax should be reinstated.
"The policy that polluters should pay makes sense," Rep. Ferguson said. "And it makes sense to go back in that direction. I would hope that the administration would reconsider this decision."
Local government officials were most concerned that the sites would not receive the funds at all.
"It’s very important that the funding for this design and remediation come through," Montgomery Mayor Louise Wilson said. "The question remains whether it will, and certainly we’ll work to make that happen."
Much of the original hazard from the TCE contamination has been controlled, according to DEP spokesman Fred Mumford, though there is still a significant presence of TCE in the water supply. The private wells in the area were capped, and the EPA paid for the installation of a piped-in water supply system. The Rocky Hill Borough Council spent $250,000 in the early 1980s on equipment to treat the water in its municipal well, for which it is still seeking federal reimbursement.
The bulk of the $2.5 million that was to be sought this year would have purchased similar water treatment equipment in Montgomery, Mr. Cahill said, but the design of the remediation program needs work. And while funding for the cleanup will not be available until at least 2003, the funds for the program’s re-design have already been secured, he said.
The DEP has filed suit against Princeton Gamma Tech on Route 518, which the agency believes is responsible for the contamination.