Up to your tuchas in Atlantic City back-bay floodwater? The Army Corps is working on it. Can you wait until 2026?

Atlantic City floodingU.S. Army Corps of Engineers considers a range of defenses, including new floodwalls and storm-surge gates, but construction unlikely before 2026

Jon Hurdle reports for NJ Spotlight:

Andrea Petinga never had flooding on her property in Atlantic City until Hurricane Sandy, but now it happens twice a month when there’s a full moon or a new moon, and she’s sick of it.
Petinga, who lives along the Intracoastal Waterway on the bay side of Atlantic City, took her concerns to a meeting held by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at Ventnor on Wednesday to update the public on its massive five-year study on how to defend New Jersey’s back bays from the bigger storms and rising seas that are forecast for coming decades.
Officials said they expect to publish draft recommendations in December but those won’t be finalized until 2021 and the construction of new floodwalls, storm-surge gates or any other defenses isn’t expected until 2026 at the earliest.
That’s too late for people like Petinga, 69, who told the meeting that she doesn’t have a decade or more to wait for the authorities to figure out a way of stopping rising seas from the back bays flooding people’s properties.
“Since Hurricane Sandy, every full moon, every new moon, I have water at my house, and if you don’t move your car you will lose your car,” Petinga said in an interview after the meeting. “My sidewalk is falling in, and there’s no help. There’s no money to do anything, is what I’m told.”

Forced to relocate?

With no solution in sight, Petinga said she has considered moving away from the house where she has lived for 46 years but doesn’t want to because she likes where she lives. Still, she accepts that she might eventually be forced to relocate if the waters continue to inundate her property.
“Yes, if the water keeps coming up and nobody does anything,” she said, showing a reporter pictures of her flooded yard on her phone. “The water comes through the bulkhead during high tide whereas it never did before. It’s rotting away and nobody takes care of it.”

Up to your tuchas in Atlantic City back-bay floodwater? The Army Corps is working on it. Can you wait until 2026? Read More »

Before you do an enviro-cleanup for a NJ county, read this

A Gibbons environmental attorney has some words of advice for any developer or other parties that might be planning to perform an environmental remediation on behalf of a New Jersey county. 


In an alert to the firm’s clients, 

Gibbons attorney Paul M. Hauge

Paul M. Hauge writes:

For purposes of obtaining financial assistance from the State, cleaning up environmental contamination for a governmental body’s benefit is not the same as cleaning it up on behalf of the government as its formal designee. That is the hard lesson that a former landowner learned in the New Jersey Appellate Division’s August 29, 2018 decision in In re Hazardous Discharge Site Remediation Fund Public Entity Grant Application for Remedial Investigation and Remedial Action.
When Barry Rosengarten contracted to sell a parcel of land in Perth Amboy to Middlesex County for use as open space, he agreed to remediate environmental contamination, and the County escrowed monies from the sale to be released to Mr. Rosengarten as he performed the cleanup. The County also agreed to cooperate in seeking State grants that could offset those costs and thus reduce Mr. Rosengarten’s net cleanup expenses.
Through Mr. Rosengarten’s counsel, the County applied to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) for either a Brownfield Development Area Grant or a 75% Recreation and Conservation Grant. NJDEP denied the application after finding that the County was not performing the cleanup and that the contract did not provide that Mr. Rosengarten was doing the work on the County’s behalf.
On Mr. Rosengarten’s appeal, after initially holding that Mr. Rosengarten had standing to appeal even though he was not the applicant, the Court affirmed NJDEP’s denial of the application. The relevant statutory provision, N.J.S.A. 58:10B-6.a(2)(a), authorized grants to “municipalities, counties, or redevelopment entities,” making Mr. Rosengarten himself ineligible. Furthermore, the County was ineligible because it did not perform the remediation work, incur any cleanup expenses, or designate Mr. Rosengarten as a “redeveloper” or as its agent for purposes of the remediation. Nor was the County eligible for a recreation and conservation grant under N.J.A.C. 19:31-8.3(b)(2), as the parcel was not part of any comprehensive development or redevelopment plan.
With the best of intentions, the parties here sought to use the Hazardous Discharge Site Remediation Fund to advance the very purpose for which it exists – cleanup of environmental contamination on publicly owned land. Their contract, however, left too much of a gap between the private party doing the cleanup and the public entity that would benefit from that cleanup. Parties to similar arrangements in the future will do well to heed the lesson from this case.

Before you do an enviro-cleanup for a NJ county, read this Read More »

Local recycling starts to feel ripple effect of China ban

China will no longer accept some materials and wants others to be much cleaner. As a result, recycling has become more complicated and more expensive for communities across New Jersey


Tom Johnson reports for NJ Spotlight:

Recycling waste in China

Credit: Creative Commons
A child sits atop unusable recycled materials in China.
Recycling is getting a lot more complicated, a trend that is spiking costs and leaving reams of paper, plastics and other recyclables to pile up in warehouses, or worse, in landfills.
It is a problem occurring not only in New Jersey but across the nation as China, the biggest market for recyclables in the past, has essentially stopped accepting raw materials from foreign recycling businesses. The new policies this spring have disrupted a global market and left some communities with the unhappy prospect of paying to get rid of recyclables instead of selling the waste.
It is likely to get worse before it gets better, too, industry experts say. That means residents must adapt to tougher sorting policies when they attempt to dispose of plastics, paper, and other waste, often in the same recycling bin. That practice, dubbed “single-stream recycling,’’ is now being phased out in some cases. Instead, residents are being ordered to separate paper from cardboard, glass from plastic, food waste from other recyclables, and so on.

Millburn, Cranford, Westfield make changes

The change has led communities to educate the public to be more careful in what they throw in the recycling bin. Millburn, for instance, no longer accepts plastic bags in its curbside recycling. In Cranford, residents must rinse out containers and clean out any food waste. Westfield no longer accepts shredded paper.
“It is going to be two years of not so good times,’’ predicted Ann Moore, recycling coordinator for Burlington County. “Long-term, the outlook is good, but in the short term, it is going to be tough.’’
Like many other states, New Jersey has a big business in recycling; it employs more than 17,000 people here and generates $548 million in tax revenue, according to a study done by the Institute for Scrap Recycling Industries. 


In Burlington, the county has seen its costs increase by 15 to 20 percent this year as it had to increase the number of employees from 24 to 32 to separate unwanted material from recyclables to meet tougher standards, Moore said.
Those costs have risen even though Burlington has been able to find markets for its recyclables, including plastics — probably the material most affected by the change in China’s policies, Moore said.

US exports massive amounts of scrap to China

Recyling in China

Credit: Creative Commons
Women sort plastics for recycling in Guangzhou, China.

In the past, the global recycling market revolved around China, according to Mark Carpenter, senior director of communications for the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries in Washington, D.C. Last July, China announced new policies to ban some materials and to require what recyclables it accepted to be much cleaner.

For the U.S., which last year exported $5.6 billion worth of scrap commodities to China, the new policies quickly hit home. “China basically changed the market overnight,’’ Carpenter said.
“What it has done is stopped recycling in its tracks,’’ said Frank Brill, a lobbyist in Trenton who represents recyclers. “Recyclers are stockpiling materials by renting out space in warehouses. There are few places willing to take it.’’
It also has left towns facing higher and unanticipated costs, according to Marie Kurzman, executive director of the Association of New Jersey Recyclers.
“The economics are going to force the issue,’’ she said. “Now, the towns are finding it difficult to get the deal they were used to receiving.’’

Where will recycled material go?

Recycling Single stream

Credit: USEPA
Sorting through recycled items in Montgomery County, Maryland

Ultimately, it could force the recycled material to wind up in landfills because there is no place willing to take it, Brill said. Atlantic Coast Recycling in Passaic told News 12 that 10 to 25 percent of its collected material is now being recycled.

Recycling contractors also are getting squeezed. Their facilities are making not enough profit in selling the materials they collect, process and transport, Kurzman said.
Just how big an impact the Chinese changes will have on recycling in New Jersey is difficult to gauge, officials said. In 2015, the most recent year for which information is available, the state recycled about 43 percent of its municipal waste. That total increased to 63 percent recycled when commercial waste is included.
Eventually, domestic markets may develop to absorb some of the gap left by the disruption in the Chinese market. For instance, some manufacturers have expressed interest in opening up new mills to process cardboard and paper here in the U.S., according to Brill.
“There are some opportunities, but there also are some challenges,’’ said Carpenter.

Local recycling starts to feel ripple effect of China ban Read More »

Mixed reviews for a $120M food-waste energy plant at Philly refinery, the city’s largest emitter of particulates

Nat Hamilton/WHYY
Philadelphia Energy Solutions is the largest oil refining complex on the Eastern seaboard and is the city’s largest source of air pollutants. The refinery announced a deal this month RNG Energy Solutions to host a commercial biogas facility. Nat Hamilton/WHYY
Catalina Jaramillo reports for StateImpact:
Making energy out of trash has great environmental appeal. Yet last week’s announcement that a commercial biogas plant is planned for 22 acres at the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery complex in South Philadelphia — already considered the largest source of particulate emissions in the city — has tempered the local environmental community’s enthusiasm.
According to RNG Energy Solutions, developer of the proposed $120 million plant, it will have the potential to turn 1,100 tons of commercial food waste from the Philadelphia region that otherwise would be burned or sent to landfills into 22,000 to 24,000 gallons (3,000 dekatherms) of renewable natural gas daily, using anaerobic digesters.
RNG Energy president James Potter told StateImpact the agreement isn’t a Philadelphia Energy Solutions investment or even a partnership: RNG Energy will enter into a long-term site lease with PES, and the refinery will pay for the biogas plant’s total renewable natural-gas production.
Further details of the contracts were not revealed. According to the city, the facility would receive no public financial assistance, although it will be eligible for state and local tax credits because it would be located within a Keystone Opportunity Zone.
Clean-air advocates, environmental activists, and city officials said they needed more information about the potential environmental impact of the Point Breeze Renewable Energy facility before making judgments.
“Overall, it’s positive,” said Christine Knapp, director of the city’s Office of Sustainability.
Philadelphia needs renewable-energy sources to meet its clean-energy and carbon-reduction goals — Mayor Jim Kenney recently confirmed its pledge to meet a 100 percent clean-energy goal as part of the city’s clean energy vision plan to reduce emissions 80 percent by 2050. Natural gas from the RNG Energy facility could potentially fuel both the city’s and SEPTA’s fleet. Decomposition of organic material in landfills liberates carbon dioxide and large amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas roughly 30 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than CO2.
“[But] we want to make sure that it’s done appropriately, taking into consideration the neighbors and respecting their concerns. We also want to make sure that it does fit in with our carbon and energy goals — which it does look like it aligns, but there’s still more research we have to do to make sure it does,” Knapp said.
Matt Walker, advisory director of the Clean Air Council, a nonprofit that has continuously opposed PES, said that residents need more information about the project, and that state and city agencies must give them the opportunity to engage in the permitting and decision-making process.

Mixed reviews for a $120M food-waste energy plant at Philly refinery, the city’s largest emitter of particulates Read More »

NJ economic development bills in committee Thursday

The Assembly Commerce and Economic Development Committee will meet on Thursday, September 13, 2018 at 2:00 PM in Committee Room 16, 4th Floor, State House Annex, Trenton, NJ.

The following bills will be considered:

A1700 (Dancer / Vainieri Huttle) – Specifies vacant shopping malls and office parks as eligible for designation as areas in need of redevelopment.

A2926 (McKeon) – “New Jersey Transit Villages Act.”

A3075 (Quijano / Pinkin) – Encourages development of public electric vehicle charging infrastructure in redevelopment projects.

A3797 (Jasey / Chaparro) – Permits municipal land banking in conjunction with online property database development.

A4023 / S446 (DeAngelo / Addiego / Madden) – Provides preferences for certain businesses applying for workforce development grants.

AJR150 (Johnson / Conaway) – Designates October 8 of each year as “Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Day” in NJ. (pending intro and referral)


Like this? Click to receive free updates

NJ economic development bills in committee Thursday Read More »

Dog, cat and honey-bee bills, too, in NJ Senate committee

Senate Environment and Energy Committee
Thursday, September 13, 2018
10:00 a.m. Room 10, 3rd Floor, State House Annex

S1707 Exempts governmental entities acquiring lands for open space located in a deed-authorized common interest community from paying community fees if, at time of acquisition, community has never been formed or has been dissolved or discontinued.
S2511 Changes title of DEP “conservation officer” to “conservation police officer.”
S2553 Provides corporation business tax credit to taxpayers that develop qualified native pollinator habitat on undeveloped property.
S2554 Provides corporation business tax credit to public utilities that develop qualified native pollinator habitat in their rights of way.
S2826 Requires institutions of higher education to offer cats and dogs no longer used for educational, research, or scientific purposes to animal rescue organizations for adoption.
Like this? Click to receive free updates

Dog, cat and honey-bee bills, too, in NJ Senate committee Read More »