Since taking office last year, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy has sought to place concerns about environmental justice in the foreground of New Jersey’s regulatory decision-making process. Advocates and policymakers long have maintained that locally undesirable or polluting land uses disproportionately are located in low-income, typically urban communities that lack political influence or sufficient resources to protect their interests.
Regulation of stormwater in New Jersey is undergoing a shakeup that may have significant consequences for redevelopers and property owners. In fact, New Jersey recently enacted legislation that allows municipalities to create stormwater utilities. This legislation, which has been called a “rain tax,” authorizes these utilities to impose fees and take other actions to control stormwater. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection also recently proposed changes to the regulations governing stormwater management in connection with certain construction projects.
In a move that has assuredly grabbed the attention of the regulated community, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (“NJDEP”) recently commenced two major initiatives in an effort to further address the emerging, hot-button issue of poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances (“PFAS”) contamination in the state.
New York began last year to require remediating parties to investigate whether groundwater at their sites was contaminated with the emerging contaminants 1,4-dioxane and PFAS (i.e., per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances). (See our May 29, 2018 Blog Article – NYSDEC Requiring Site Owners to Investigate Emerging Contaminants.) Now, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation is broadening this requirement by mandating investigation of the presence of these contaminants in all environmental media, not just groundwater.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit recently handed down two noteworthy decisions on environmental liability under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (“CERCLA”). One involves the appropriate methodology for allocation of cleanup costs between two responsible parties based on equitable factors; the other involves whether a new owner of contaminated property is responsible for governmental response costs incurred prior to its purchase of the relevant property. Both set new precedent that should be of interest to the regulated community.
The State of New Jersey ratcheted up its environmental enforcement activities earlier this year with the filing of six lawsuits seeking to recover environmental damages, as we previously reported in There Is A New Sheriff In Town – State Files Six New Environmental Enforcement Cases. While we wait for these lawsuits to move forward, one question remains: If “there is a lesson in everything,” as a wise man once said, what lessons are to be learned from the filing of these suits?
The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (“NJDEP”) continues to take action on emerging contaminants, and, as of September 4th, adopted a maximum contaminant level (“MCL”) for perflourononanoic acid (“PFNA”) in drinking water. PFNA is not regulated at the federal level, and New Jersey is the first state to set an enforceable standard for PFNA in drinking water. The new MCL is 0.013 micrograms per liter, that is, 13 parts per trillion, an extraordinarily low level.
States are going to have a greater role in setting energy policy under the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s (“EPA”) proposed Affordable Clean Energy (“ACE”) Rule. EPA proposed the ACE Rule to replace the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan (“CPP”), which never took effect due to legal challenges. Unlike the CPP, where the EPA set standards and requirements for state plans, the newly proposed ACE Rule tasks the States with a larger role in pursuing clean power and addressing pollution from existing coal power plants, invoking mixed emotions from various sectors of the community.
Contaminated site remediation projects in New Jersey are governed by an assemblage of rules and regulations that implement the State’s environmental statutes. Just last week, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (“NJDEP”) adopted amendments to a number of these rules. While the NJDEP has characterized the amendments as changes that will clarify the rules and further streamline the implementation of the site remediation program, there are a number of noteworthy revisions that modify existing remediation obligations and procedures.
Touting it as the “largest single-day environmental enforcement action in New Jersey in at least a decade,” the State yesterday filed six lawsuits seeking to recover cleanup costs, three of which also seek recovery of natural resource damages (“NRD”). The dramatic announcement yesterday left no doubt that the Murphy Administration’s approach to environmental enforcement will be markedly different than the essentially non-existent enforcement under the Christie Administration.
