BY PATRICIA A. MILLER
Staff Writer
EDISON — You would think the executive director of the Edison Wetlands Association (EWA) would be happy with the news that more open space might be donated to the township.
You’d be wrong.
EWA Executive Director Robert Spiegel lashed out last week at part of a settlement between the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and those held responsible for the pollution at the Kin-Buc landfill on Meadow Road.
“It’s not going to be good for the community, it’s not going to be good for the environment,” Spiegel said Friday.
Transtec Inc., the owner and one of the former operators of the infamous landfill, one of the oldest on the Superfund list, agreed to transfer title to over 100 acres of land in and near the site to the nonprofit Clean Land Fund (CLF).
The CLF will set up a community outreach program to help determine the planning and development of the property for open space, said John Prince, the EPA’s chief of the central New Jersey remediation section and a Superfund supervisor.
“Part of the settlement involves this relatively intricate open-space planning process, where a third party, nonprofit Brownfields group is going to take possession of the land Transtech used to own,” Prince said. “They will go through a sort of public participation process, including a public meeting with neighbors and interested environmental groups to try and develop some consensus on what some of the best interests for this land might be.”
But Spiegel thinks the land should have been deeded over to the township, not CLF, which he calls an “economic brownfields” developer.
The settlement also calls for the former owners and operators of Kin-Buc to pay $2.65 million in reimbursement costs to the EPA for overseeing remediation efforts at the site.
“It’s a good news, bad news settlement,” Spiegel said. “It’s good news the EPA is going to get some cost recovery. But it’s bad news that the EPA and Department of Justice and Transtech want to turn this land over to the Clean Land Fund.”
The Clean Land Fund has “absolutely no track record,” he said.
“We could not find anything about this group at all,” Spiegel said. “They have no Web site. They have never done any restoration work, anything of this caliber.”
The EWA plans to submit written objections to the plan during the 30-day comment period, he said.
“We are going to be working with a lawyer and other nonprofits, and put together a significant comment letter,” Spiegel said. “We’re objecting to that portion of the settlement. They could have done this without involving this third party.”
Spiegel fears that CLF’s plans could harm the fragile wetlands ecosystem in the lower Raritan.
“We are going to see legally what kind of actions we can take,” Spiegel said. “The EPA and the Department of Justice, in order to make some deal, they were willing to make a bad deal. We understand that currently in Washington, the EPA has their hands tied with enforcement and so does the Department of Justice. It’s a difficult situation and we know it.”
The land transfer portion of the settlement is unique, Prince said.
“This is a mechanism that EPA has tried to bring to the settlements, where parties are able to create environmental or ecological projects,” he said. “It really does provide some interesting opportunities for the township.”