Posted on June 10, 2024
New Jersey environmental and transportation regulators cleaning up a lucrative coastal recreation zone were barred from dumping their dredging sludge in a containment area that a state court said was operating under a faulty, defunct permit.
State cleanup efforts for Barnegat Bay—the brackish waters inland from the state’s beloved 18-mile Long Beach Island—can’t deposit dredging waste in a storage facility initially permitted in 1983 for private owners, the Superior Court Appellate Division ruled Friday. After the state bought it two decades later, environmental regulators violated the law when they allowed transportation officials to “piggyback” off the site’s old permit.
