Officials award contract for soil cleanup

Contentious discussion coupled with a thumbnail education of the soil remediation process preceded the Manalapan Township Committee's passage of a resolution that awarded a $15,000 soil cleanup contract for township-owned property on Route 522.

TTI Environmental Inc., of Moorestown, will clean up soil that was contaminated by a leaking heating oil tank and by pesticide use on a former farm.

The resolution that awarded the job to TTI Environmental was finally passed by the entire governing body at the Dec. 12 meeting, but not until after several members had a goround that was sparked by Committeeman Anthony Gennaro's request for an explanation of the costs being accrued for the soil remediation that will be conducted on a portion of land Manalapan bought in 2005.

Two years ago the township bought two private homes on Route 522 in order to settle litigation with the property owners. The homes are in front of the Manalapan Recreation Center.

Mayor Andrew Lucas asked Gennaro why he was seeking specific information during a public meeting of a matter that is the subject of ongoing litigation.

"To my recollection, you voted on all these resolutions. Why are we bringing this out in public when this is something, as an elected official, you should be keeping a tally on every time you vote? I don't understand why you want to make ongoing litigation a public item," Lucas said.

"I've kept a tally, but do they know that; does the public know what's going on?" Gennaro responded.

He said he was only interested in discussing the engineering costs and not the finer points of the ongoing litigation.

Committeeman Richard Klauber also took issue with Gennaro's attempt to discuss the project's costs during the public portion of the meeting instead of confining it to executive (closed) session.

"You continue to bring the topic up publicly, and I'm troubled by it," Klauber said.

According to Klauber, he found Gennaro's desire to discuss the specific costs of the soil remediation project "problematic" since he, Klauber, believed such discussions could interfere with the legal strategy of the litigation the township is involved with regarding the soil remediation issue.

The ongoing litigation involves Manalapan and Stuart Moskovitz, who was serving as the township attorney when Manalapan purchased the two Route 522 properties in 2005.

In response to Klauber, Gennaro said, "There's a lot of public question, that's all. We've come under criticism for the engineering costs of this [issue]."

Klauber, who is an attorney, observed, "I understand wanting to have discussions so the public understands what we're doing with it, but when you start discussing numbers I have a problem with that."

Township Attorney Caroline Casagrande weighed in on the discussion by observing, "When the township goes to settle this matter, it's in the best interests for the town to have no commitment to specific figures."

Committeewoman Susan Cohen, in a seeming effort to support Gennaro's query about the costs, made reference to a recent News Transcript story ("Attorney Expects to File Answer to Town Complaint," Dec. 12, 2007) in which Lucas said Moskovitz's "alleged malpractice [in 2005] has cost the taxpayers of Manalapan in excess of $100,000 …"

Lucas said that amount would include the soil cleanup, the attorneys and the engineering fees associated with the Manalapan vs. Moskovitz case.

"The problem is that Mayor Lucas made a statement in the newspapers about $100,000 and that's why we've been getting phone calls and e-mails from people asking where we got that number from," Cohen said.

Before explaining the work done in relation to the soil remediation project thus far by his firm, CME Associates, township engineer Greg Valesi told Gennaro, who has made several complaints over many months that he is not being kept in the loop on this and other municipal issues, "I have kept everyone abreast through memos. I have been keeping you all updated as to the course throughout. It has been delivered to each one of you."

Valesi spoke with the News Transcript before the Dec. 12 meeting and addressed the figures contained in his firm's March 2007 "Site Investigation - Remedial Investigation Report and Remedial Action Work Plan." The newspaper had obtained a copy of the report.

Valesi discussed the work done by his firm that was necessary prior to preparing the specifications that had gone out to the contractors who would do the actual soil remediation, and the figures, several of which are stated as being projected costs, contained in CME's report.

Valesi stressed the fact that undertaking any environmental cleanup is a painstaking process with a strict protocol established by the state that requires a meticulous follow-through.

He said the first things CME had to do was de-commission an underground oil tank (from one of the two private homes) that had leaked and test an adjoining farm field for historic pesticide contamination; two areas of concern that had been referred to in the preliminary assessment of the property that had been prepared by another engineering firm, Birdsall Engineering, at the time of the township's 2005 purchase of the two single family homes on Route 522.

The two parcels that contained the houses are referred to as the Dreyer home and the Herbert home.

Valesi also said the cleanup consisted of two separate aspects; one is the soil contamination in the immediate vicinity of the Dreyer home - contamination that was caused by an underground heating oil tank that leaked heating oil into the soil - as well as historic pesticide contamination that was found in an isolated patch of an adjoining former farm field.

Valesi said when the oil tank was removed from the ground as required by law, there was significant and apparent rusting, which indicated the tank had been leaking.

He said despite a representation that was made to Manalapan representatives at the time of the purchase (2005) of the Dreyer home that the underground oil tank had been properly decommissioned - a process that would have included filling the empty tank with sand - the evidence when the tank was removed from the ground indicated that not only had it not been filled with sand, as had been reported, but that there was still some oil left in the tank.

The breakdown of the costs started with the first phase of the tank removal and went through to the final phase of the project when it would be expected that the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) would issue a No Further Action letter. The letter certifies that an entity has satisfied all of the cleanup requirements mandated by the state.

The costs contained in the CME Associates report were as follows:

• Tank removal and consulting, $14,026.

• Phase One Site Investigation - remedial investigation, $11,273.

• Phase Two Site Investigation - remedial investigation, $13,300.

• Remedial Action - contaminated soil (removal of the former underground storage tank which required on-site oversight by CME Associates), $13,500 (projected cost).

• Remedial Action - contaminated soil removal or blending, pesticide impacted area, also requiring on-site oversight by CME Associates, $5,000 (projected cost).

• Institutional Control (deed notice filing), $2,500 (projected cost).

• Final DEP reporting, remedial action report, $10,000 (projected cost).

"It's a big undertaking and a timeconsuming process to accurately define the horizontal and vertical extent of the contamination so the contractor has a clear direction of what has to be moved and to what limits," Valesi said.

He said being able to make the correct determination about the extent of the contamination involved detailed soil borings and ground water sampling each step of the way.

According to Valesi, the DEP requirements are "specific and need to be completed."

Seven contractors submitted bids for the project which will include cleaning up the soil contamination that was caused by the leaking heating oil tank at one of the private homes and by the historic pesticide use on the adjoining former farm. The winning bid of $15,222 was submitted by TTI Environmental Inc., of Moorestown.

The other bidders were T. Slack Environmental Service, $19,345; Falcon Ridge Construction, $23,370; JAC Excavating, $29,410; AWT Environmental Service, $33,219; GWS Contractors Inc., $39,226; and Entech Group Inc., $41,480.

In summing up his explanation at the Dec. 12 committee meeting and commenting on the reason why all of the firms were able to bid the way they did, with the winning bid for the work coming in at under $20,000, Valesi said, "The bids were so low because of the detailed work done by CME."

He said his firm will also have to oversee the final remediation.

"When you approach a project such as this you don't look at it and say, 'Well, it only cost $15,000 to clean up, how could it cost so much to remediate?' You remediate because you had contamination. You had a spill. It was a significant product discharge. It took a lot of time to make sure we had the limits clearly defined. Our numbers are out there as a matter of public record and I stand behind them," the engineer said.