Pennington has submitted a revised application to the New Jersey Department of Enviornmental Protection (NJDEP) focused on funds for a more extensive remedial investigation of the Pennington landfill.
The application is for grant funding from Hazardous Discharge Site Remediation Fund (HDSRF), which provides funds for the investigation, remediation, and cleanup of a suspected or known contaminated site.
The fund is through a partnership between the NJDEP and the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA). The DEP will evaluate an applicant’s preliminary eligibility requirements, the technical merits of the proposed project, and the estimated project costs.
Should NJDEP approve the applicant NJEDA will then evaluate the applicant’s financial status, determine eligibility, and award the funding, according to NJEDA.
The landfill property consists of three parcels consisting of about 8.5 acres and is located between West Delaware Avenue and Broemel Place. Additionally, the property was designated as an area in need of redevelopment.
Lawra Dodge updated Pennington Council on where the Borough stands on the Phase II work on the remedial investigation. She is from Excel Environmental Resources, an environmental consulting firm out of North Brunswick that is conducting the environmental investigation at the landfill.
“We had a meeting with NJDEP regarding the scope and the only thing they really cut back on was the deep bedrock investigation,” she said. “They took the position that they wanted us to do the investigation that we originally proposed that focused on soil quality in the landfill area, the shallow groundwater quality and the intermediate bedrock quality first.”
Dodge shared that Pennington is still going forward with the soil investigation to verify PFAS (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances). PFAS are human made chemicals.
NJDEP approved the ecological risk assessment of the groundwater to surface water discharge.
“In order for us to determine whether there is any contribution to the drainage ditch in the Lewis Brook we need to do the ecological risk assessment to figure out if there is any ecological impact. So that work was approved,” Dodge said.
“They approved us resampling all the existing wells. They approved us installing four more bedrock wells, which are key to figuring out the direction of the groundwater flow given the site’s complex location relative to the sites around it and relative to what is suspected to be an offsite source of impacts to the site which is that former Hourglass Dry Cleaners.”
The former dry cleaner site is still being investigated by the NJDEP and they believe it is a site that is contributing to impacts on the Landfill property, according to Dodge.
She explained they are going to have to parse through what could be coming onto the Pennington landfill property, what is coming from the site, and then what if anything has to be done regarding the ground water flowing into the surface water.
“[The state’s] focus and our focus is to get this data,” Dodge said, hoping they don’t have to do any deeper investigation. “… We find that we have more coming onto the site then is coming from the site. In which case they think we have a strong argument for saying we are done, and we can look at how we have to go forward. What remediation would have to be done for this property, how much would that cost, and what would it look like.”
The NJDEP wanted Pennington to add to the work scope – a remedial action work plan – that would look at what had to be done environmentally to enable the borough to look at alternatives for redevelopment.
“The project is eligible for grant funding,” Dodge noted. “So, we are getting an additional $250,000 to fund everything but the deep bedrock investigation, which is a really expensive venture.”
