By RICHARD PEARSALL
Courier-Post Staff
FLORENCE
After piling mounds of contaminated dirt near the rowhouses of the old steel-making village of Roebling, NJ Transit is now erecting a 12-foot-high, wooden "privacy" fence for a more upscale neighborhood on the other side of its light rail line here.
The fence is being erected at the request of the residents of Hoffner Court, whose two-story, colonial-style homes back up to the rail line, NJ Transit officials said Thursday.
Residents and Mayor Michael Machowski acknowledge that they joined forces to press NJ Transit to erect the fence, saying they were fighting for privacy and safety.
The fence, which is under construction, will extend some 1,800 feet and shield a playground and some other, more modest homes in addition to Hoffner Court.
It is one of just two "privacy" fences NJ Transit has erected on the 34-mile, Camden-to-Trenton line. The other is a 25-foot to 30-foot wooden fence on Neck Road in Burlington Township.
Meanwhile, in the Roebling section of town, residents were bewildered that Assembly Majority Leader Joe Roberts has asked the state to remove the dirt NJ Transit has piled in East Camden.
"Why isn't anyone getting excited up here?" asked Donna McElrae, the owner of Donna's Deli in Roebling and a lifelong resident.
Others who live near the berms in Roebling said they had no idea what the mounds were for, much less what they contained.
"You just wouldn't think that's something they would do," said Jessica Fleming-Lacher, who has a 4-year-old son and is pregnant with her second child.
"The neighborhood parents cleaned that out so kids could play there," she said, pointing to the partially wooded area between the neighborhood and the piles of dirt.
The mounds of dirt in Roebling, while only about a quarter of the size of those in East Camden, contain the same contaminants, including lead, arsenic, benzene and polychlorinated biphenyls.
Nicholas Martone, project manager of the South Jersey Light Rail Line for NJ Transit, said Thursday the mounds were created in response to a request from local officials to provide a barrier to discourage children from crossing the track.
He conceded that the mounds also proved useful from a financial standpoint as a way to dispose of excess dirt excavated from the rail line's right-of-way.
Machowski said he and other township officials accepted NJ Transit's proposal to build a berm as a barrier, but insisted that NJ Transit never told them the dirt was contaminated.
"Do you think if we knew what was in there we would have accepted it?" Machowksi said Thursday.
Martone said he was sure he told local officials that the dirt to be placed in the berms would contain "regulated" material and said there were minutes of a public meeting to prove it. Regulated material requires control such as capping with clean soil.
Minutes forwarded by NJ Transit were from an executive session of Florence Township Council dated April 3, 2003, which was after the berms were in place.
The Department of Environmental Protection approved NJ Transit's plan to build the berms here and in Camden. The DEP concluded that the level of contaminants in the dirt is low enough that it can be safely placed in a nonresidential area, provided it is capped with cleaner soil.
Thursday, in response to Roberts' demand that the dirt in East Camden be removed, leaders of the DEP, NJ Transit and the Department of Transportation, NJ Transit's "parent" department, all acknowledged a failure to communicate with residents in Camden. They promised a major program of outreach but would not commit to removing any dirt.
"There is a clear recognition that as the project moved forward it was not handled appropriately," said Mary Helen Cervantes, a spokeswoman for DEP commissioner Bradley Campbell. "There certainly was not enough involvement of the community and we want to correct that."
But, she added, the DEP continues to believe that the project was properly assessed, "based on standards designed to be protective of public health."
In Florence, Machowski said he's worried that NJ Transit is not properly implementing the plan it contends it is following.
While the plan calls for an 18-inch cap of clean soil, including top soil, the top layer of the berms in Florence contain rocks that appear to have come from the old road bed.
Along Hoffner Court, residents offered no apologies for the activism that landed them a fence.
"We've been fighting for that fence since they first introduced the idea of a light rail line," said Jim Bruno, whose opposition to the light rail line itself goes back to 1996.
"I guess it's the squeaky wheel that gets the oil," Bruno said.
Greg Tolifero, Bruno's neighbor, described the effort as a "long, drawn-out battle" that heated up when NJ Transit cut down trees, first on their side of the track, eliminating whatever shield they had from the rail line, then on the other side, apparently to make way for the berm.
"Once those trees came down, we knew we had to do something," said Tolifero, who pointed out where a section of woods appears to have been cleared in order to extend the berms on the Roebling side of the track.
Reach Richard Pearsall at (856) 486-2465 or rpearsall@courierpostonline.com
