Residents living near 900 Garfield Ave. in Jersey City can come to a meeting on Monday to hear plans for a cleanup of the 16-acre site, contaminated with cancer-causing hexavalent chromium. But some of them are already unsatisfied with the level of the cleanup that’s being proposed.
The cleanup was specified in a controversial settlement between the state, the city of Jersey City, and Pittsburgh-based PPG Industries, and was approved last June by the City Council. PPG must clean up the soil and sources of chromium contamination at the Garfield Avenue property within five years. PPG had operated at the site from 1954 to 1963.
The settlement calls for a 20 parts per million cleanup.
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But some area residents have criticized the settlement because they feel its standards are not stringent enough for a thorough cleanup of the site. They say the standard should be 1 part per million.
Some of these critics have joined a federal lawsuit filed in February by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Hudson County-based citizens’ group, Interfaith Community Organization (ICO), to force PPG to pursue a stricter cleanup than stipulated in the settlement. A federal judge ruled last month that their lawsuit can go forward.
The public meeting will be held this Monday, April 19, at the Mary McLeod Bethune Life Center, 140 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. There, representatives of PPG Industries will discuss the cleanup.
They want more from cleanup
Felicia Collis and Ed Vergara, both of whom live near the site, are concerned. Both are members of the neighborhood group GRACO (Garfield, Randolph, Arlington, Clerk, Claremont, Carteret, and Ocean – streets near the site). They also are a party in the federal lawsuit, and they both plan to attend the meeting.
Collis, who lives three blocks away from the cleanup site with her teenage daughter, said she knows what to expect at the meeting and wants to hear something different.
“Unless they address the need to remove the chromium 100 percent and not 20 parts per million, until they address that, there is really nothing to talk about,” Collis said.
Vergara, a software developer and father of a 1-year old child, lives a block from the site and wants as strict a cleanup as possible. He is optimistic that the lawsuit will prevail.
The meeting is sponsored by the Chromium Cleanup Partnership. The partnership includes the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, the City of Jersey City, and PPG Industries, which have agreed to work together to address the 20 chromium sites in Hudson County that will be remediated by PPG.
The fourth member of the partnership is the independent site administrator Mike McCabe, who was appointed by the Superior Court of New Jersey and given oversight responsibilities for PPG’s cleanups.
Representatives from the Chromium Cleanup Partnership did not return phone calls last week for comment about what will be discussed at the meeting or if the federal lawsuit could have an impact on the cleanup.
City spokesperson Jennifer Morrill commented last week the city is still “digesting” the federal ruling. But she said city officials are confident that the cleanup will be acceptable as currently dictated under the settlement.
“We are absolutely convinced that with the guidance of the site administrator and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, that the consent judgment is the best way to provide for an expeditious and thorough cleanup of the Garfield Avenue site and the other PPG sites,” Morrill said in a statement.
Ricardo Kaulessar can be reached at rkaulessar@hudsonreporter.com.