TRENTON — Legislation sponsored by Senator Shirley Turner that would require the state to make serious efforts to boost participation…
S1897
TRENTON – A bill sponsored by Senator Bob Smith, Chairman of the Senate Environment Committee, which establishes a licensed site remediation professional program in New Jersey to speed up the clean-up of contaminated sites around the State was signed into law today by Governor Corzine.
“This new law represents a huge step forward in revitalizing and remediating contaminated sites and transforming them into viable real estate,” said Senator Smith, D-Middlesex and Somerset. “For so long, polluted sites have been allowed to linger because the State simply didn’t have the resources in the DEP (Department of Environmental Protection) to cut down on the backlog. Through this law, environmental consultants would be deputized by the DEP to handle non-sensitive site clean-up approval, and we can finally begin to reclaim some of these sites for the people of the Garden State.”
TRENTON – A bill sponsored by Senator Bob Smith, Chairman of the Senate Environment Committee, which would establish a licensed site remediation professional program in New Jersey to speed up the clean-up of contaminated sites around the State was approved by the full Senate today by a vote of 34-4, receiving final legislative approval.
“Right now, New Jersey has a backlog of over 20,000 known contaminated sites in the State that are not being cleaned up fast enough,” said Senator Smith, D-Middlesex and Somerset. “These sites are a blight on our neighborhoods, a major public health hazard, and an impediment to the environmentally-sound redevelopment of our aging urban and suburban industrial communities. If we’re going to overcome the backlog, ensure the public health and transform these sites into useful, viable property, we need to change how we handle the site remediation approval process in the Garden State.”
TRENTON – A bill sponsored by Senator Bob Smith that would help accelerate the transformation of abandoned and contaminated properties into productive economic engines received approval today from both the Senate and Assembly environment committees after a lengthy joint hearing.
Bill S1897, which is modeled after a highly successful program in Massachusetts, would create a Licensed Site Remediation Professional (LSP) program within the Department of Environmental Protection, providing (re)developers with a more efficient means to remediate sites that pose a hazard to public health.