Thursday, April 26, 2007
By JAN BARRY
STAFF WRITER
Correction
Ford Motor Co. wants the federal government to fine Ringwood almost $17 million if it won't agree to help pay for cleaning up the auto giant's toxic waste dump in town.
That's the bottom line of a letter from Ford to the borough. It argues that for the past 18 months, Ringwood has been in violation of a federal order to work with Ford on the cleanup -- and should incur the maximum fine of $32,500 per day since then.
Borough officials, who oversee a municipal budget totaling just $14.5 million, deny the accusation and say they have been negotiating with Ford in good faith to come up with a specific sum the borough will pay.
Veteran observers of Superfund cleanups, including the state's former environmental chief involved in the Ford cleanup, said they have never seen a case like this.
Borough Attorney Joseph Maraziti Jr., one of the state's top environmental lawyers, told the Ringwood Council on Tuesday night that the borough faces unusual pressure from the federal Environmental Protection Agency "inspired by Ford Motor Co."
For example, he said, "Ford has asked EPA to collect $16 million in fines and penalties" for not agreeing to Ford's demand that Ringwood pay "an undetermined amount of money" to help clean up Ford's hazardous waste.
Ford dumped millions of pounds of industrial waste in the 1960s and 1970s in a former iron mine area, then donated much of the land to the town. The EPA ordered Ringwood to help pay cleanup costs because the borough operated landfills in the area that the agency says accepted Ford waste.
Ford is engaged in its fifth cleanup of lead-based paint sludge in and around mine pits in the Upper Ringwood residential neighborhood. The site has been re-listed as a Superfund site, reversing a 1994 EPA declaration that it had been cleaned up by Ford at that time.
Pat Carr, an EPA spokeswoman, said Wednesday that the agency would not discuss ongoing enforcement action, other than to say that "EPA has not at this point fined the borough." Carr said the EPA did not raise the issue of fines. Ford, she said, raised it in a letter to Ringwood.
Ford's Feb. 27 letter to Ringwood's attorney for this case, Albert Telsey, was provided to the EPA by Ringwood. In the letter, Ford attorney David Hayes said he was going to tell the EPA that Ringwood was in violation of the EPA's September 2005 order to work with Ford. "Accordingly, the borough has accrued penalties under the order of more than $16,737,000," Hayes concluded.
A Ford spokesman, Jon Holt, said Wednesday that Ford wasn't making a demand.
"It was just pointing out facts," Holt said. "It was a request that EPA help resolve this stalemate."
Bradley Campbell, a former EPA regional administrator and the current state environmental protection commissioner involved in the Ringwood case, said he had never encountered a situation where one party dictated how much of a fine should be imposed on another party.
"That's an outrageous demand by Ford, particularly when this municipality was instrumental in revealing Ford's failure to perform an adequate cleanup of their Superfund site. It's very rare for a municipality to receive a penalty anywhere near this magnitude. It would only be justified in a case where the municipality was responsible for serious misconduct," Campbell said.
"In this case, it's more likely that the failure of the municipality to come to an agreement with Ford is due to Ford's unreasonable position, rather than any fault of the municipality," he said.
David Grubb, the director of a municipal self-insurance fund based in Saddle Brook, said, "I've never seen a situation where a municipality is hit by fines and penalties for this kind of situation,"
Grubb is executive director of Municipal Excess Liability Joint Insurance Fund. He pointed out that many towns have been sued and paid a portion of cleanup costs at landfills that became an environmental hazard. And it's not unusual for one party to point out other parties who might be liable.
"It's all part of getting somebody else to pay the liability," he said.
E-mail: barry@northjersey.com
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