BY TOM CAIAZZA
Staff Writer
EDISON – A special Planning Board meeting set to continue a contested application for a 500,000-square-foot warehouse to be built on the ILR landfill was postponed Wednesday.
The application is being brought forth by JERC Partners VII, a development company, who has leased the property from Industrial Land Reclaiming, the owners of the landfill.
The Planning Board meeting was originally scheduled to continue on March 8 but was rescheduled for April 5. The new date is expected to be May 17.
The owners of the property, ILR, received Notices of Violation from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) in February citing violations to the landfill’s closure/post-closure plan that has been in place since the landfill officially closed in 1985.
According to Larry Hajna, a spokesman for the NJDEP, testing conducted by a consultant hired by JERC VII found, among other things, high levels of hazardous materials in the soil outside of the landfill’s clay cap, that appeared to contain fragments of asphalt.
The consultant found levels of polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), a chemical believed to be linked to cancer and hormone interference in wildlife such as fish. The PAHs are usually present in petroleum-based products such as asphalt.
According to a Compliance Evaluation Summary conducted on Jan. 17 by the NJDEP, investigators into the Jan. 10 complaint filed by the Edison Wetlands Association (EWA) found “seven trucks dumping what appeared to be unclean fill in a time frame of only seven minutes.”
The investigator found that the fill being dumped included wood, plastic, piping, very dark sludgy fill, reddish dirt-like fill and brownish dirt fill. The fill was observed to be five to six feet above the final cover of the landfill and was spread out over much of the lower part of the front of the landfill.
The report said that the majority of the new, unclean fill being placed on the landfill consisted of concrete, brick, asphalt, plastic bags and other forms of solid waste.
According to the Compliance Evaluation Summary, the investigator walked the perimeter of the landfill and found waste “protruding” from outside of the core wall of the landfill. That waste included rusty drums, tires, plastic and metal.
EWA Executive Director Robert Spiegel has been a staunch opponent of the development planned for the ILR landfill, and has said that the site has environmental issues that go beyond the unclean fill, including problems with the leaching system and concerns over methane levels from decomposing fill.
“There are so many technical issues that have to be resolved,” Spiegel said, “and we told the applicant that there is no way you could get approval on this, and [so] we’re not going to object to it.”
Spiegel said that developing on the property as it is would be detrimental to the environment surrounding the landfill, which includes a nearby day care center.
“Putting a development on top of this landfill … is problematic at best, on any landfill,” Spiegel said. “But with this particular one, with all the hazardous waste and the methane and all the illegal toxic fill that’s there now, it really wasn’t in their [JERC Partners VII] best interest to move forward.”
John Hague, an attorney for JERC Partners VII, said that the developer is working on plans and “detailed revisions of a technical nature” and pulled last week’s hearing in order to have those plans concluded before going before the Planning Board.
Spiegel was critical of the NJDEP and Edison Township’s vigilance in enforcing environmental safeguards in regard to the ILR landfill. He said the two had “turned a blind eye” to the issues there and have only now, at the urging of the EWA, begun to address those issues.
“They felt nobody was paying attention, but what they don’t realize is Edison Wetlands is always paying attention,” Spiegel said. “We don’t stop.”
In a letter addressed to Spiegel from Irene Kropp, the NJDEP’s assistant commissioner for the Site Remediation and Waste Management Program, Kropp wrote that the NJDEP would be extending the closure/post-closure period for the landfill, which was expected to be completed in September 2016, but gave no indication of how long that period would be extended by.
The letter also addressed the EWA’s request that the NJDEP cease consideration of JERC Partners VII’s application for the 500,000-square-foot warehouse due to the alleged illegal activity and the outstanding issues. In the letter, Kropp said that the department would continue to review the redevelopment of the site, taking into consideration the Notices of Violation issued on Feb. 1.
Representatives from Industrial Land Reclaiming could not be reached for comment on this matter.