Environmental
standards should protect our critical natural resources. They should
be enforced in a timely, consistent and equitable manner for all
violators. The public has a right to know. Government should maximize
fiscal accountability and transparency, and allow maximum citizen
participation in the political process.
Right?
According
to the Natural
Resource Damages (NRD) report prepared for the NJDEP in 2006,
Exxon's Bayway and Bayonne refineries polluted soils, sediments, and
surface and groundwater in about 1,700 acres of wetlands, meadows,
and streams in the Hudson-Raritan Estuary for over 100 years.
Petroleum products and waste, consisting of hundreds of different
organic contaminants and heavy metals, were spilled, discharged, or
discarded - as dredge material for filling salt marshes, in leaking
landfills, leakings
barges, pipeline ruptures, tank failures, overflows, and
explosions.
The
courts ruled that Exxon was liable for damaging the region's natural
resources. The report recommended that the state seek compensation.
More than 500 acres around Bayway and 25 acres around Bayonne were to
be restored at a cost of $2.5 billion. Additionally, Exxon would have
had to restore more than 30,000 acres of wetlands, meadow and forest
elsewhere in NJ, at a cost of $6.4 billion - for
a total cost of $8.9 billion.
The
State has inscrutably decided to settle with Exxon for $225 million.
This amount alone guarantees that meaningful restoration is moot. But
it never had a chance anyway. Since last year, penalties from Natural
Resource Damages over
$50 million can be diverted into the general fund rather than be
used for their intended purpose.
Like
a few months ago - when
three quarters of a $190 million settlement to restore natural
resource damages in the Passaic River was diverted to the general
fund.
It
is not just the local communities who have lost something. The
Hudson-Raritan Estuary drains into the ocean past Sandy Hook.
Monmouth County's Bayshore and ocean resources are downstream
of the “pervasive and ubiquitous” contamination from these sites.
The County is in the path of the runoff from Exxon's “tar
flats” and landfill “popups” during routine rainfall, let
alone during a flood. Keeping this kind of arbitrary decision-making
as the status quo is not in the County's economic and environmental
interests.
To
protect the public health and the environment, two very loose ends
need to be nailed down by the NJ Department of Environmental
Protection and our legislature.
It's
been five years since the Administration's
own transition team warned that rules needed to be adopted for
the NRD process “to provide transparency, certainty and consistency
in the assessment of those damages.” The NJDEP needs to finally
adopt regulations that provide standards for quantifying
NRD damages. The NJDEP Baseline Ecological Evaluation, which has
been adopted, only documents the damages; it
doesn't assign a quantifiable cost. The State is weakened
in settlement negotiations without having specific numeric
standards to fall back on. It is settling for fractional penalties
that ensure there will be no meaningful restoration – or that taxes
will have to subsidize the private sector's mistakes - and deepen our
state deficit. Having standards is but one way of eliminating the
disturbing disconnect that is evidently happening now during penalty
negotiations.
It's
also clear that legislation is needed to require that NRD penalties
are dedicated for what they were intended: funding
the restoration of damaged natural resources.
