The borough has been awarded a $248,000 state grant for the supplemental remedial investigation of the Pennington landfill.
Pennington Council members through a vote on Nov. 4 accepted the grant from the Hazardous Discharge Site Remediation Fund (HDSRF), which provides funding for the investigation, remediation, and cleanup of a suspected or known contaminated site.
The HDSRF program is through a partnership between the New Jersey Department of Enviornmental Protection (NJDEP) and the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA).
The landfill property consists of three parcels consisting of about 8.5 acres and is located between West Delaware Avenue and Broemel Place. Council members have already designated the landfill as an area in need of redevelopment.
The landfill, which is not in operation, was the topic of discussion at the Pennington Redevelopment Committee meeting on Oct. 23 where members of the committee and public discussed potential ideas for the redevelopment of the landfill.
Pennington applied for the HDSRF grant in the summer. In August, Lawra Dodge, founder and president of Excel Environmental Resources, a North Brunswick-based environmental consulting firm, updated officials and residents on the Phase II work of the remedial investigation. The borough had hired the firm to conduct the environmental investigation of the landfill.
NJDEP officials recommended cutting back on the deep bedrock investigation of the landfill.
“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 said.
Pennington is still going forward with the soil investigation to verify PFAS (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), which 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,” Dodge said. “So that work was approved.”
NJDEP approved the resampling of all the existing wells and the installation of four more bedrock wells, which are key to figuring out the direction of the groundwater flow, Dodge said noting the landfill’s location relative to the sites around it and to a suspected offsite source of impacts from the former Hourglass Dry Cleaners.
The former dry cleaner site is believed to be contributing to groundwater impacts on the landfill property, according to Dodge.
Officials will 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, Dodge said.
“[The state’s] focus and our focus is to get this data,” she 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.”
Additionally, NJDEP recommends expanding Pennington’s work scope for the grant – a remedial action work plan – that would look at what has to be done environmentally to enable the borough to look at alternatives for redevelopment.
