NEWARK (AP) The contaminated site of a former waterfront scrap yard will be redeveloped by a container shipping company using a $125 million loan from the state, officials announced Friday.
Gov. James E. McGreevey said the project would remove pollutants at the 15-acre site along Newark Bay and create 500 permanent jobs at the company, Port Newark Container Terminal, after temporarily employing 3,200 construction workers.
McGreevey said the project is consistent with his administration’s ”smart growth’ philosophy of steering development away from previously unoccupied space.
”We cannot simply develop where it is the cheapest and easiest,’ McGreevey said at a waterfront news conference, framed by giant orange cranes used to load and unload shipping containers. ”We must look to our older suburbs and urban areas.’
Besides cleaning PCBs, the project will upgrade the area where Port Newark Container Terminal, known as PNCT, handles containers just before and after they are loaded or unloaded.
McGreevey also announced Friday that he will submit a plan to the Legislature on Monday that would move the state program to clean contaminated industrial sites, known as brownfields, from under the state Department of Environmental Protection and the Department of Community Affairs to the New Jersey Economic Development Authority.
The shift, he said, would facilitate cleanup and development of brownfields because the development agency has the authority to issue bonds to finance the projects. For example, the EDA will issue $125 million in bonds for the Port Newark project, which will be repaid by the company.
Jeff Tittel, executive director of the Sierra Club, said shifting responsibility for brownfields to the EDA makes sense.
”They’ve got the money,’ to finance cleanups, Tittel said. ”It should be tied to economic development because that’s the way brownfields get cleaned up.’
Chris Lytle, president of PNCT, said the redevelopment project announced Friday will allow the company to handle another 100,000 containers a year.
Because of the U.S. trade deficit, most of the containers handled at the ports in Newark and Elizabeth are incoming. As a result, mountains of empty containers have risen along the waterfront in recent years in indefinite storage, because officials say it is too expensive to ship empty containers back overseas to be reloaded.
A recent study commissioned by the North Jersey Transportation Authority found the build-up of containers can discourageredevelopment of brownfields, whose owners can simply lease them for container storage, which does not require cleanup.
McGreevey said the build-up is ”a concern,’ and that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is trying to address the situation.
Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the agency, said one method being explored is to reload the empties with nontraditional freight _ scrap metal, for example _ for shipment back overseas.
