Call for board, comprising numerous holdovers from prior administration, to resign en masse
Members of the progressive political establishment joined forces Tuesday to keep the pressure on the beleaguered Economic Development Authority, or EDA. The semi-autonomous agency has been the subject of tough rhetoric from the administration, and unflattering headlines, which allege that it threw away $11 billion in good money after bad on corporate citizens who failed to deliver sufficient bang for the buck. The activists blamed the board for being asleep at the wheel.
“Money that could be used for schools, roads, and bridges. Instead it has gone to some of the most profitable and politically connected companies in the state,” said New Jersey Working Families interim director Rob Duffy. “And as we are seeing from whistleblower account after whistleblower account, there was a lack of oversight, accountability, and transparency at the authority.”
A task force appointed by the governor to investigate the authority heard testimony recently about companies that lied and circumvented guidelines to benefit from EDA tax breaks. Outrageous, said the activists at Tuesday’s demonstration and news conference. Someone should be held responsible.
Who’s watching the henhouse?
“This type of behavior cannot be the norm,” added Sue Altman, a board member with South Jersey Women for Progressive Change. “New Jersey needs an entire rethink about how it performs checks and balances over our most powerful citizens. We need an end to political cronyism. This is the fox guarding the henhouse and it must stop today.”
The first step? The board — still mostly made up of appointments from the previous administration — should resign, said the coalition, which took its ire to the authority’s regular monthly board meeting.
“The most recent reports from the comptroller and the whistleblowers coming up demonstrate that you all, the board, are asleep at the switch or active participants in this corruption,” charged David Pringle, longtime environmental activist and now principal consultant with David Pringle Associates. “Either is unacceptable, and it’s time for you to resign, today.”
Thanks, but no thanks
Reaction from the board? Thank you, and, “OK, we’ll move on to our authority matters. Tim, you’ll start us off,” said board chairman Laurence Downes.
The board did approve the governor’s brownfields and film and TV credit programs, so that was something from the governor’s incentives agenda that did progress.
There was no comment from board members on either the demonstration before or the presentation at Tuesday’s meeting. And anyone who thought that there would be actual resignations would be shocked to find that there were none.
ON GUARD Florida’s sentinel chicken programs may include Leghorn (shown), Barred Rock or Rhode Island Red breeds.
For 40 years, they’ve held the front line in Florida’s fight against mosquito-borne diseases. And it turns out that the chickens standing sentinel in cities, marshes, woodlands and residential backyards are clucking good at their job.
Last year, chickens in 268 coops in over a third of Florida’s counties provided scientists weekly blood samples that revealed whether the birds had been bitten by mosquitoes carrying West Nile virus or the Eastern equine encephalitis or St. Louis encephalitis viruses.
If a chicken’s blood tests positive for antibodies to one of those viruses, authorities know that the pathogen is circulating. And if enough birds have the antibodies, state officials can ratchet up mosquito-killing measures such as pesticide spraying to help halt disease spread.
The sentinel chicken surveillance programs are “a really good way of monitoring” for certain virus activity, says Thomas Unnasch, a biologist who studies vector-borne diseases at the University of South Florida in Tampa. The birds “are sampling literally hundreds or thousands of mosquitoes every day,” he says. (The chickens can’t keep tabs on dengue or Zika; the mosquitoes carrying those viruses prefer to bite people rather than birds.)
In 2018, 833 chickens tested positive for West Nile virus antibodies in Florida, but only 39 people did, according to data from the state’s health department. For Eastern equine encephalitis virus, 154 chickens tested positive in 2018, compared with only three people.
Chickens that test positive for the viruses being surveyed don’t transmit them, and people don’t either. Both are considered “dead-end hosts,” meaning that the viral concentration in the blood doesn’t get high enough to infect another mosquito after it bites. Infected cardinals, robins and other backyard birds are the animal reservoirs that help keep the three viruses spreading in the area.
Sentinel chickens, by detecting where and when disease-carrying mosquitoes are buzzing, are also providing valuable data on how a virus can spread. Data from 2005 to 2016 revealed that Eastern equine encephalitis virus is active year-round in the Florida panhandle, making the area a source from which the virus moves elsewhere in the state and along the eastern United States, Unnasch and his colleagues report online March 11 in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
In people, the viral diseases monitored by the chickens are relatively rare, but can be deadly. The chickens don’t get especially sick, though. “You don’t usually see any symptoms at all,” Unnasch says.
Any chicken whose blood tests positive for the antibodies is removed from the coops since that bird can no longer alert authorities to a new infection. For these chickens, retirement may be spent on a farm, with school or 4-H clubs, or in a backyard coop, depending on the county. The sentinel chicken programs are ready with replacements, raising chicks to supply new birds to signal “where we have a threat to human health,” Unnasch says.
Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of occasional articles inspired by readers’ curiosity. What do you wonder about the Baltimore area that you’d like us to investigate? Tell us at baltimoresun.com/ask.
If you ask Baltimore Police Sgt. Kurt Roepcke how the city feels about the Inner Harbor, he says most residents tend to look at the water like it’s lava.
After years overseeing the Baltimore Police Department’s dive team, Roepcke knows the waterway, snaking around the Fort McHenry National Monument and into downtown, can confound expectations. On some clear days, he might even describe it asphenomenal.
Several hundred years ago, Europeans settled the region in part because of the sparkling natural harbor that was ideal forfisheries and shipping. But decades of sewage overflows and industrial waste dumping have given the harbor a persistent — and deserved — reputation for being foul.
Still, experts in Baltimore’s scientific, conservation and public safety spheres say there are surprises and life in the water. The often-opaque Inner Harbor teems with wildlife alongside sunken history and humanity’s polluted footprint.
In the first installment in a series inspired by readers’ curiosity, The Baltimore Sun took a look at what’s in the harbor water and interviewed people who’ve ventured the approximately 30 feet to the bottom.
The Inner Harbor has a persistent — and somewhat deserved — reputation for being foul. But still, experts say there’s life and surprises in the water. Here’s a look at what we’ve found there, from sunken cars to aquatic life and everything in between.
What we leave behind
The harbor floor predominantly consists of silky dirt — or silt — that gets swept around depending on the currents, Roepcke said.
Along the western wall in front of Ripley’s Believe It or Not, trash and piles of sediment accumulate. In front of Fort McHenry, the floor of the harbor entrance is smooth and hard, he said. The shifting soils can mean the depths of the harbor can vary.
Plenty of wildlife swims through the currents and crawls along the floor.
“There’s lots of fish, lots of crabs,” Roepcke said. “I haven’t seen any snakes, but we see jellyfish and rockfish.”
And there’s more resting on the harbor floor than just the living.
As head of the police underwater recovery team, Roepcke’s job is to know what’s down there. Sometimes that work means searching for bodies and weapons, or maintaining national security by checking ships and tunnels for explosives. Other times it means retrieving electric scooters, abandoned water crafts and old vehicles from the water.
There’s life, history and sunken surprises concealed beneath the harbor’s sometimes murky surface. (Baltimore Sun graphic | Source: NextZen, OpenStreetMap, National Aquarium, Baltimore Police Department)
At low tide, two sunken boats, one of which Roepcke believes is a 1940s banana boat, still pierce the water’s surface in front of Fells Point’s Union Wharf Apartments. Somewhere along the waterfront off the 1700 block of S. Clinton St. rests a vintage Cadillac. The police diving team has even found old cannonballs near Fort McHenry, he said.
Police aren’t the only ones to pull treasures from the water.
As the city was prepping for the construction of the Fort McHenry Tunnel in 1980, an archaeological survey was conducted in a portion of the harbor near the national monument. The archaeologist conducting the survey told The Sun at the time he found at least four ships scuttled in a cove, junked grenades that were thrown into the harbor after the Civil War, beer bottles dating to World War I and an American Indian stone knife.
The indigenous tools may have been dug up during the dredging of the harbor as there was no evidence of any collection of similar artifacts in the area, The Sun reported at the time.
The Sun described the findings as “Nothing of any great historical significance, but an interesting potpourri of artifacts from Baltimore’s past.”
A plume of brown substance was flowing into the Baltimore harbor near the U.S.S. Constellation in June 2018, prompting the city to investigate. (Jerry Jackson/Baltimore Sun video)
Pollution and contaminants
When a body of water is capable of supporting three anthropomorphic trash wheels, the presence of garbage and pollution can hardly come as a surprise.
Plastic water bottles and bags are easy to spot on the surface, and items like mattresses, clothing, street signs and plastic margarita cups are frequently retrieved, several experts who work along the harbor said.
A harbor initiative supported by the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore is aimed at making the harbor “swimmable and fishable” by 2020 — though those involved with the plan acknowledge that goal will be difficult to attain.
Blue Water Baltimore scientist Alice Volpitta’s boat has lost two expensive anchors to the harbor floor. What they snagged on is anyone’s guess, she said.If it were me, I’d never touch the harbor water without gloves and hand sanitizer.— Alice Volpitta, Blue Water Baltimore scientist
Volpitta’s job is to monitor the waste in the harbor water that is invisible to the naked eye, such as bacterial matter, nutrient excess and industrial toxins.
“If it were me, I’d never touch the harbor water without gloves and hand sanitizer,” she said.
Trash and pollution is not a new problem in the Inner Harbor. Here, garbage invades in 1973. (Baltimore Sun files)
Blue Water Baltimore maintains 49 testing stations around the Inner Harbor and Jones Falls that are designed to monitor water quality. The program is also helping the city fulfill the terms of a consent decree to correct the Baltimore’s aging sewage system, which routinely overflows. In 2018, Maryland’s wettest year on record, millions of gallons of sewage-tainted stormwater overflowed from Baltimore’s sewer system into tributaries and the harbor.
That summer, Volpitta recalls seeing a syringe filled with blood and several large grease balls — a clumping of hair, toilet paper and not-so-flushable wipes — floating by her boat after one of several stormy days, she said.
The sediment that sits along the harbor floor also contains cancer-causing compounds like PCBs and hexavalent chromium. The contaminants are left over from the days when Baltimore’s industrial manufacturers used the harbor water to flush away unwanted waste, chemicals and heavy metals.
Several experts including Volpitta told The Sun there is an unofficial rule among local members of the scientific community not to disturb the silt along the harbor floor for fear of mobilizing the hazardous toxins and heavy metals.
In 2006 Yair Goldberg was sure automated parking was about to take off. As an executive at Israeli industrial-automation firm Unitronics, he had just led its first project in the United States, a retrofit of a troubled robotic garage in Hoboken.
The technology had gained notoriety for snafus including cars being dropped off platforms. But the kinks were being ironed out. The systems offered convenience to customers and let developers build garages that could accommodate twice as many parking spots as a conventional arrangement in the same footprint.
After the financial crisis hit, Unitronics did not sign contracts for new systems until 2012. Today, operating under the brand name U-tron, the Hackensack, N.J.–based company has installed seven robotic garages across the country and has orders for more than 20 others, including 15 in the metropolitan area.
David Hughes, vice president of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT faculty union and a professor of anthropology, said the labor union members voted to authorize a strike Monday after more than a year of contract negotiations.
“It is not that surprising because we have been going at this for a year,” Hughes said. “We have not made progress on equal pay for equal work. We want raises for our lowest paid instructors who are earning $5,200 per course. That is appalling. They have no job security. We are asking for more money.”
The labor union represents 4,800 people and more than 2,400 voted. Eighty-eight percent of those roughly 2,400 members voted to strike, Hughes said.
“We are going to make a determination on striking soon,” Hughes said. “I hope the administration will read our stances as serious. However, there is still distance on many points. The administration will not even talk to us about hiring more teaching assistants.”
“We have been bargaining for over a year now and while the threat of a strike is having an impact on the Barchi administration, we still have unresolved issues,” Deepa Kumar, President of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT, said in a statement to NJBIZ. “We just won $20 million for diversity hiring, but we need to also win equal pay for equal work for women faculty, fair wage increases for our least paid members particularly our grad employees, and a higher faculty to student ratio to improve the quality of education. This strike, if we strike, is about defending quality public education.”
Scott Fallon, North Jersey Record Published 6:45 a.m. ET April 9, 2019
Environmental officials have ordered a state agency to curb elevated levels of a noxious gas wafting from the last operating landfill in the Meadowlands after already citing the agency for allowing sewage to be dumped there. (Video is below.)
This time, however, the culprit doesn’t appear to be wastewater. Instead, it’s likely coming from rotting pieces of drywall, which can emit hydrogen sulfide when wet.
The fumes have prompted a wave of criticism over how the Keegan Landfill in Kearny is managed, and has renewed calls for it to be closed.
The New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority is scheduled at its Thursday meeting to hire an environmental firm to monitor the air surrounding the Keegan Landfill for hydrogen sulfide under an order from the state Department of Environmental Protection.
“We firmly believe that it is unacceptable for our landfill to be disruptive or troublesome for its neighbors and the community that hosts it,” the commission said in a statement on its website.
But the commission has maintained that closing the landfill will not reduce the fumes — a position disputed by many nearby residents and officials. Residents living near the 110-acre dumping ground have been complaining for months about a strong odor of rotten eggs, as well as irritated eyes and burning throats.
“I don’t think anyone will be satisfied with a solution that goes only halfway,” Kearny Mayor Alberto Santos said. “Everyone knows what needs to be done here.”
The Keegan Landfill is a major source of revenue for the authority. It generated $17.7 million in tipping fees last year accepting mostly construction debris.
But at least on one occasion, the landfill accepted sewage waste while a DEP inspector was present.
The inspector filmed the dumping, which occurred on July 3. Santos obtained a copy of the video in January and posted it on social media, drawing outrage from residents, more than 100 of whom went to the authority’s meeting last month to voice their displeasure.
The story continues below this DEP inspection video that shows sewage being dumped at the Keegan Landfill on July 3, 2018:
At the urging of residents, another DEP inspector visited the Keegan Landfill on March 1 and found readings of hydrogen sulfide just above the state standard of 30 parts per billion.
Air samples taken by a Kearny contractor also found elevated levels on 14 days since monitoring began in mid-February. The samples were taken almost 1,000 feet from the landfill at the town’s Department of Public Works yard, Santos said. The DEP fined the agency $2,000 because of the fumes.
Breathing in low concentrations of hydrogen sulfide can cause irritation to the eyes, nose and throat along with difficulty breathing for some asthmatics, as well as headaches, fatigue and balance problems. It is also highly flammable.
Hydrogen sulfide produces a rotten egg smell even at low concentrations. It is emitted from wastewater treatment plants as well as landfills when organic waste such as food breaks down.
But the source at Keegan may be drywall, which emits the gas when bacteria break it down. The DEP told the authority to “minimize or eliminate” drywall made of gypsum.
Santos thinks that would be difficult, since the bulk of Keegan’s trash each day comes from construction sites.
