Funds earmarked for fuel contamination cleanup
State-ordered remediation continues at former boro hall
BY SETH MANDEL
Staff Writer

JAMESBURG — Efforts to clean up the soil underneath the borough’s former municipal building will continue this year, and the Borough Council last week set aside $150,000 for the project.

“We’re working now to get everything taken care of,” Mayor Anthony LaMantia said. “We’ve been working on it; it just takes a long, long time to do.”

The East Railroad Avenue building served as borough hall and housed several municipal offices as well as the police station until 1999, when the offices were moved to the current municipal facility on Perrineville Road.

Two years prior, in 1997, officials removed a 1,000-gallon gas tank and a 1,000-gallon heating oil tank, according to Terence Vogt, director of the environmental division for the engineering firm Remington & Vernick, Haddonfield. That division of the firm is conducting the remediation.

The soil was tested, and petroleum contamination was found in the soil and groundwater. The state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) ordered the remediation, though officials do not have a timeline for its completion.

“And it’s just been checked on and checked on, and every time the DEP comes up with something that they say we have to check on, we just have to keep going, because it’s an open case,” LaMantia said.

In December 2003, the council made room in an already tight budget for $20,000 in cleanup-related costs. That number is up to $150,000 this year, which is the estimated cost of the remediation, Business Administrator Denise Jawidzik said.

Since the DEP is overseeing the cleanup in steps, local officials cannot estimate when the borough will be eligible to receive a letter of no further action (NFA), she said.

“They haven’t even exactly told us what we have to do in order to satisfy them,” Jawidzik said.

Vogt said interior and exterior air sampling was conducted toward the end of last year, and additional indoor air monitoring was conducted this month at the facility.

“As a precautionary measure, a vapor mitigation system will be installed in this building later this year, to prevent the possibility of petroleum vapors accumulating within the building,” Vogt said.

The building, 31 East Railroad Ave., is the current location of Little Wonders Day School, a day care center that opened in September 2002.

LaMantia said the operators of the day care center have been very cooperative throughout the process.

“We’re working very closely with the DEP and very closely with the owners of the place, and everything has been going along very well,” he said.

The day-care center itself is unaffected by the contamination underneath it, LaMantia said, and the DEP has allowed the business to remain open as the project continues.

“We’re doing everything that we have to do to make sure it’s safe and everything else, and at the same time, to remediate the problem,” LaMantia said. “Whatever the DEP is telling us to do, that’s what we’re doing.”