Chintall: Focus on Business Retention Act, Not Cleanup

The recent signing into law of a bill forcing industrial companies to set aside property tax refunds to pay for cleanup efforts is a good move, West Deptford Mayor Ray Chintall said, but it’s too little, too late for the township, as far as Sunoco and Eagle Point are concerned.

Chintall gave credit to state Senate President Stephen M. Sweeney, who in a field outside Eagle Point’s gates earlier this year, but also criticized the senator for not doing more to help towns like West Deptford battle industrial giants when it comes to property taxes and value assessments.

“I, like Sen. Sweeney, understand and overall agree in principle that any company that inflicts damage to our natural resources should be responsible for its remediation,” Chintall said in a statement. “But, that still doesn't take away the fact that West Deptford taxpayers have to foot the bill for over $30 million dollars in this tax appeals settlement, to both oil companies and now a state agency.”

It appears likely $13.1 million marked for Sunoco’s portion of a is destined for the state Department of Environmental Protection, which would set aside the funds for site cleanup under the new law.

Sweeney hailed it as a victory over companies like Sunoco, which he said haven’t been held accountable for the damage they’ve done.

“For too long, New Jersey was seen as a toxic dumping ground by corporations who ceased operations, went bankrupt or otherwise abandoned New Jersey,” said Sweeney. “We have tried with some success to force these companies to clean up the mess they left, but it is nowhere near enough.”

While Chintall agreed with that sentiment and said elected officials need to be “good stewards of our natural resources,” he said it’s just as important to protect taxpayers’ financial interest.

To that end, Chintall said Sweeney should be concentrating on spiking the Republican-sponsored Business Retention Act of 1992, which Chintall blamed for putting West Deptford in an untenable position trying to defend the Eagle Point assessment.

“If Senator Sweeney had focused his efforts on those reforms, West Deptford might not have had to agree to a settlement, which in turn put an unnecessary burden on our residents,” Chintall said.

Work on the Business Retention Act, criticized in media reports at its passage for shifting the tax burden from corporations to residents, has come up previously—Sweeney sponsored a bill, S1006, in the 2006-2007 legislative session, which would’ve killed portions of the act with respect to refineries and forced refinery equipment to be taxed as real property, rather than as business personal property.

That bill never made it past introduction, however.

It needs to come up as part of regular legislative review, Chintall said, given it leaves municipalities “very little recourse to any reasonable solution.”

“This act's prevailing use by corporations may very well affect West Deptford and many similar New Jersey communities with additional and unnecessary tax appeals in the future,” he said.

The new law, meanwhile, puts a mandate on cleanup efforts that have been ongoing at Eagle Point, where, according to Sweeney’s office, there are some 350 monitoring wells for groundwater contamination and 18 remediation wells currently in operation.

The bill extends that to any industrial property that’s totally or partially decommissioned and is subject to federal or state remediation orders. Sunoco idled Eagle Point in late 2009 before closing it for good in early 2010, wiping out hundreds of jobs in the process.

The refinery itself is currently in the process of being that began in February.