Newark Mayor Cory Booker plans on adding up to 600 abandoned properties to the tax rolls with a redevelopment plan.  This plan encourages neighborhood revitalization, provides downtown housing, sparks growth in underused areas, creates job opportunities and ultimately improves the quality of life for city residents.

The plan proposed to the city council begins with a list of abandoned properties.  Once identified, the city can make the owners rehabilitate the property or lose it through expedited foreclosure, tax liens or eminent domain.  The city council must approve the plan that will use inspectors from the fire department and neighborhood services to do the surveys because of their inspection power.  Part of the downtown housing plan will revise some zoning regulations thus making it easier for developers to build houses.  The increased housing requires more retail to serve residents and in turn boost job opportunities.

The New Jersey State Department Of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) has developed a new and more stringent standard for removing chromium waste from contaminated soil.

In a new effort to reduce and thwart the effects of toxic substances within New Jersey soil, sites designated to be developed for housing or educational facilities may not contain more than 20 parts per million of hexavalent chromium.  The previous standard had been 240 parts per million, which is still a safe level according to the NJDEP. However, the less hexavalent chromium present the better. Hexavalent chromium, commonly found where industrial production occurs, is recognized as a human carcinogen. Long term exposure to the compound has been found to cause lung cancer.  The chromium ore waste has been a problem for New Jersey, a large industrial state, for years. The new NJDEP standard would affect 184 sites in Hudson county, once a busy area for chromium ore refineries.  As Hudson county has seen a surge of redeveloment in the recent years, the standard of 20 parts per million in new developments will surely protect the health of current and future residents and the environment.

In December 2006, The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) signed a final rule amending the requirements and deadlines for facilities subject to EPA’s Oil Spill Prevention, Control and Countermeasure (SPCC) regulations.  The SPCC regulations require covered facilities to prevent, prepare for and respond to oil discharges.  The final rule will provide alternative compliance options for certain regulated facilities.

In particular, they clarified rules pertaining to facilities with smaller oil storage capacities, qualified oil-filled operational equipment, motive power containers, and certain vehicle fuel tanks and other on-board bulk oil storage containers.  EPA also removed sections of the rule that are not appropriate for facilities with animal fats and vegetable oils, and extended the compliance dates for farms.

On December 20, 2006, President Bush signed the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006 into law.  The new law includes both an extension and an expansion of the Federal government’s Brownfields Tax Incentive.  Originally signed into law in August 1997, the Taxpayer Relief Act (Public Law 105-34) included a tax incentive to spur the cleanup and redevelopment of brownfields in distressed urban and rural areas.  The new law extends the incentive to December 31, 2007 and makes it retroactive from December 31, 2005.  Under the Brownfields Tax Incentive, environmental cleanup costs are fully deductible in the year they are incurred, rather than having to be capitalized over a period of time, thus making redevelopment of brownfields more financially appealing.  The government estimates that approximately 8,000 brownfield properties will be returned to productive use, making the tax incentive a valuable tool for restoring brownfields and spurring economic growth.

Traditional environmental remediation methods of cleaning up soil and ground water contaminated with chlorinated solvents, such as soil excavation and disposal or ground water pumping and treatment, are often prohibitively expensive or impractical due to site conditions.  An alternative environmental remediation method used to cleanup chlorinated solvents, known as in-situ chemical oxidation, is growing in popularity and gaining industry and regulatory acceptance as it is proven to be a cost-effective, time-efficient and less intrusive alternative remedial method to achieve compliance with environmental cleanup standards.
  
In general, chlorinated solvent contaminants exist in the subsurface in multiple phases; vapor, dissolved, adsorbed and liquid, which is known as DNAPL.  When the original chlorinated solvent liquid is lost into the subsurface, portions of it may volatilize and become a component of the air in the vadose zone (dry soil), dissolve into and become a component of the ground water, become adsorbed (molecularly bound or “stuck”) to individual soil particles, or remain as a liquid.

Polychlorinated biphenyls, more commonly known as PCBs, are so hazardous that the United States government banned their usage in 1977.  Most people associate PCBs with oils used to cool industrial electrical transformers, and do not realize that some common caulking materials used in American buildings contained PCBs, until they were banned in the late 1970s.  The United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA), considers PCBs found in concentrations greater than fifty (50) ppm as hazardous.

The existence of PCBs-based caulking materials in American buildings of all types and sizes is fairly common, with one study by the Harvard School of Public Health finding PCBs-based caulking materials that exceed the USEPA fifty (50) ppm limit in one-third of the buildings examined.  Furthermore, the study found elevated PCBs levels in air samples both within the rooms of the buildings that contained PCBs-based caulking materials and the building’s ventilation systems.