By Katie Wagner, Staff Writer
MONTGOMERY — The Planning Board has warned representatives of 3M Corp. that it will want to know who will be taking over 3M’s Sourland Mountain property before hearing its revised stormwater management plan.
3M received the warning during a Jan. 28 hearing on its request for a waiver to its stormwater management application. The hearing will be continued at a later date.
”As we speak, we do not know the use of the new user … so how can we possibly judge the adequacy of the system if we do not know what it will be taking care of,” said Planning Board Chairman Steven Sacks-Wilner. “You’ve changed the design based on the reduction of a use — the production of roofing granules.”
He added, “If they’re not going to continue making roofing granules, I believe that this design would be inadequate. But 3M has made a choice to try to present us with a plan for a different use on site, but they can’t tell us what the use might be.”
Since 3M announced in June it would be selling its 1,400-acres of Hillsborough and Montgomery property, it has been making revisions to a stormwater management plan that received preliminary approval in 2003, because the company anticipates the new user will not use the site as intensively. Exactly how much scaling back of the site’s use will occur is another piece of information 3M has not provided.
While Planning Board members expressed their concerns about the lack of information 3M has given them, it was not a lack of information that prompted the Planning Board to postpone its decision on 3M’s request for a submission waiver, which focuses on a 4-acre site on the property.
Before deciding whether or not 3M should be allowed to take a more general approach to identifying trees contained in an approximately 4-acre area of disturbance than the township’s application process requires, the Planning Board said it wants the township’s consulting landscape architect, Rich Bartalone, to take a look at the property and specific area of disturbance.
”We wanted to give Rich Bartalone a chance to determine if there’s something of greater value than a tree survey that 3M could provide,” said Planning Board Member and Committeewoman Louise Wilson.
Although 3M’s purpose in attending the meeting was to request a waiver, the project’s manager, Jeffrey Szabo, provided an overview of 3M’s entire revised stormwater management plan.
Mr. Szabo, who works for the Manalapan-based engineering company CMX, explained that the plan calls for modifications to three of the five stormwater basins contained on the 3M property. On the Hillsborough side of the property, a chemical polymer flocculent will be pumped into the basin surrounded by the quarry, which 3M has named Basin 1. According to Mr. Szabo, the flocculent should enable 3M to meet the dissolved solids and suspended solids to water ratios required by the DEP. After treatment in Basin 1, the water will be pumped to Basin 2’s outlet structure.
”Basin 2 will improve because water from Basin 1 will not be commingling with it until after the water in Basin 2 enters its outlet structure,” Mr. Szabo said, during an interview following the meeting.
Modifications to Basin 4 and Basin 5, which are located in Montgomery, are also part of 3M’s revised stormwater management plan described during the meeting.
Basin 4’s outlet structure will be raised to allow the water collected in the basin to reach a higher level before exiting the basin. According to Mr. Szabo, raising the outlet structure will allow for greater sedimentation in the basin.
The size of Basin 5 will be doubled, including a height increase of four feet, Mr. Szabo estimated.
”Increasing the volume of water collected in the Basin 5, will allow the fines to settle out more efficiently,” Mr. Szabo said. Fines are power-like residue resulting from the roofing granule manufacturing process.
The tree identification waiver 3M is requesting would be for the approximately 4 acres of woods that would be disturbed through expanding Basin 5.
Other components of the project that Mr. Szabo mentioned during the meeting are the replacement of three stormwater conveyance pipes or culverts that run under the service roads located on the Montgomery side of the property.
Mr. Szabo also said 3M’s mineral fines pile will be capped and stabilized to prevent fines from running off the pile during storms.
Ms. Wilson criticized the plan for not including any revisions to Basin 3, which sits at the bottom of 3M’s approximately 60-acre, 80-foot high mineral fines pile that is covered with grass and dirt.
”I don’t understand how they can simply assume a basin that takes runoff from the pile will be permanently stable when all other evidence suggests otherwise, Ms. Wilson said.
In an interview following the meeting, Ms. Wilson added, “I don’t know how anybody can assume that that fines pile will never have an erosion event when even now it does in sections that have been capped.”
Keith Jacobs, manager of the 3M quarry and plant, said in a phone interview that he expected to be able to announce the future users of the site in “a month or so,” declining to offer any potential future uses of the site.
