Are Any Organizations Tracking Transparency Problems with the LSRP Program for the Murphy Transition?

The NJ Licensed Site Remediation Program (LSRP) was initiated in 2009 under Governor Corzine but fully implemented in 2012 under Christie. A concern has been that privatizing environmental cleanups would exempt records from OPRA, since those records are being maintained by the private sector rather than the NJDEP. This is discussed here, here, and here.

In 2012, the NJDEP published a convoluted policy to band-aid this problem “NJDEP Site Remediation Public Inquiry Policy Document October 2012”.

How well is this working? I recently spoke with someone who was trying to get some information about a groundwater plume and was told by the NJDEP they didn't track that anymore. They told him to call the LSRP, who initially told him he would have to wait a year and a half for a final report. After much angst (including plowing through the NJDEP's complicated online search program, Dataminer), he resolved it by eventually finding out (on his own, not from the DEP or the LSRP) that his problem fell into the category "substantial public interest" in Section VI on page 4 of the DEP inquiry policy. When he announced to the DEP and LSRP that he was going that route (getting 25 signatures for a petition) the LSRP gave him "additional outreach" – i.e., he started answering his questions.

My take-home message from all this was wow, what a waste of time just to get to “reasonable”. I Googled "substantial public interest" and found only one other example of someone initiating this: a letter from the Kingswood EC in Hunterdon County on April 7, 2017 petitioning the DEP to assist getting more outreach from the LSRP for a salt plume as per NJAC 7:26 C-1.7(o) http://www.nj.gov/dep/srp/community/sites/hunterdon/active/petition_for_public_interest.pdf .

Perhaps the transparency problem I am describing is not common, and the system is mostly working well for the public (is the LSRP privatization really New Jersey’s quiet environmental accomplishment, or not?).

However, while the Kingswood letter and the policy are posted on the NJDEP's “Community Relations Site Lists” page, it is way too buried for a member of the public to easily become aware of their rights and options for getting information or updates about local contaminant plumes. This kind of transparency is less like public access and more like a data dump.

At a minimum, DEP staffers should be directing the public to their inquiry policy, not just telling them to call the LSRP, and the policy should be prominently published on the NJDEP website. County and Local government should be educated about this as well so they can competently answer questions from the public.

If this problem turns out to be common, it might justify funding:

“... an electronic submittal system similar to the one utilized in Massachusetts. New Jersey's LSRP program is very similar to, and was in fact modeled after, Massachusetts' successful Licensed Site Professional (LSP) program. Recognizing the need for transparency, the Massachusetts DEP (MassDEP) set up an online filing system known as eDEP, which allows LSPs to upload submittals electronically and makes the information publicly available through a searchable database. MassDEP also scanned all the prior reports into PDFs and made them available online. By comparison, LSRPs submit forms (and, on occasion, reports) to the NJDEP in hard copy, which is stored in the NJDEP's central file along with any pre-LSRP reports, and are available for review only upon written request (and payment of related fees).”

Dataminer will need a major overhaul not just a tweak to make this work. Now, if you just want to review the work of a particular LSRP, you:

• Click “Search by Category”
• Select Site Remediation as the “Report Category”.
• You are on the Site Remediation Report page. Half way down is “LICENSED SITE REMEDIATION PROFESSIONAL INFORMATION”.
• Click on “Licensed Site Remediation Professional List”. It's alphabetical, so you can page through 29 links, or export it to a pdf or Excel spreadsheet. When you find their name, write down their License Number.
• Go back to the Site Remediation Report page. Scroll down to “LICENSED SITE REMEDIATION PROFESSIONAL INFORMATION”. Click on “License Site Remediation Professional Comprehensive Report” and enter the LSRP number.

Good luck with the Acronyms etc once you get there. I have written about how hard it is to use Dataminer to dig up information about discharges from Combined Sewer Outfalls in a previous blog.