New Jersey Senate president Sweeney sues West Deptford over oil companies

New Jersey Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D., Gloucester) is suing officials in West Deptford, his hometown, alleging that they let two oil companies skirt an environmental cleanup law in exchange for money to buy two fire trucks.

The lawsuit, filed in Superior Court in Gloucester County, argues that the mayor and township council "willfully ignored" a law designed to prevent companies from leaving a polluted site without first paying the state for environmental cleanup.

In a June e-mail exchange, a lawyer for Sunoco pledged that the oil company would pay $1 million toward West Deptford's purchase of two fire engines if the township awarded it $13.9 million for a property tax settlement and withheld nothing for cleanup in accordance with the pending law, according to the lawsuit.

"West Deptford may rely on this pledge if the two conditions precedent numbered above are met," Jeffrey Gordon, a Sunoco lawyer, wrote to a lawyer for the township, according to the lawsuit.

"You can't do that," Sweeney said Monday. "It's a bribe."

Sunoco, which operated the Eagle Point refinery in West Deptford from 2004 until it was shut in 2009, is also named in the suit, along with Coastal Eagle Point Oil Co., which operated at the site from 1985 until 2004. Lawyers representing Sunoco during the tax settlement did not return calls for response to the lawsuit.

West Deptford's solicitor, Anthony Ogozalek Jr., declined to comment, citing township policy on pending litigation.

West Deptford Mayor Raymond Chintall, a Republican, offered a brief statement in which he accused Sweeney of playing politics and chided him for suing his own town.

"Sen. Sweeney should have applied this much fervor and resolve to saving 400 jobs at the Eagle Point refinery over two years ago," Chintall said.

In a previous interview, Chintall said that the law was not in effect when the township signed the agreement with Sunoco and Coastal in June. Sweeney sponsored the bill, which Gov. Christie signed into law four days after the township inked the deal with the oil companies.

The bill, aimed at decommissioned refineries, mandated that property tax refunds be withheld until the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection used whatever money it needed to clean up sites. Once remediation was complete, leftover funds could be returned.

In letters obtained by The Inquirer, lawyers for the oil companies told the West Deptford solicitor that the law did not apply to them because the refinery site is not "abandoned" or "underused," requirements of the law.

Sweeney disagrees.

"The law is crystal clear," he said Monday. "It was a refinery; now it's a storage tank. There were 500 people employed there; there will be maybe 100 there now."

A lawyer for Coastal threatened a lawsuit if the township applied the law and withheld any of the $18.5 million of its property tax refund, according to the lawsuit.

Furthermore, Sunoco argued that it already adheres to a site remediation plan it entered into with the DEP. The company has paid $9 million in remediation costs and will continue to work with the DEP to fulfill cleanup obligations at the site, Gordon wrote in an Aug. 17 letter to the township solicitor.

DEP did not respond to calls for clarification about Sunoco's remediation requirements at the site.

In the end, the township paid more than $31 million to the two companies.

The township may have signed a deal with Sunoco and Coastal before his bill became law, but a judge hadn't yet signed off on it, so the deal wasn't done, Sweeney argues.

The lawsuit is one of several lines of attack Sweeney has taken against the oil companies and the West Deptford Township Council, which Republicans took over this year. He also has asked the Attorney General's Office to investigate.

The attorney general already is investigating an alleged quid pro quo scheme in West Deptford, this one at the behest of the Republican-controlled council.

According to Chintall, hundreds of people, including water department employees, are accused of getting free water and sewer service. That investigation was prompted by an audit that Republicans commissioned when they took over the council this year. Democrats controlled the council for more than two decades.

The Attorney General's Office does not comment on ongoing investigations.

Sweeney said that idling the refinery and converting it into a storage facility cost hundreds of jobs, and that he worried that the site wouldn't be adequately secured, making it potentially more dangerous.

"You're putting a giant powder keg in my community," he said. "If you guys are going to leave, you're going to clean this up . . . and it's going to cost a hell of a lot more than $30 million."