Landfill

The Pottstown Landfill can grow eastward by 76 acres, the West Pottsgrove Zoning Hearing Board has decided. After months of testimony, the board on Tuesday night upheld a decision township commissioners made in June that allowed land bordering the Sell Road landfill to be rezoned from residential to resource recovery for the purpose of expansion, said Edward Skypala, solicitor for the West Pottsgrove Zoning Hearing Board. "This decision does not come as a surprise to us," said Buzz Cuthbert, president of Alliance for a Clean Environment, a local, nonprofit organization that works to resolve environmental problems.

Pennsauken officials yesterday rejected a demand by the Camden County freeholders to extend the deadline for the county to finalize plans to buy the township landfill. The action leaves the county's proposed trash disposal system in doubt. The landfill purchase plan was authorized by the freeholders in October. It was to have taken effect yesterday. Under the proposal, the county would have paid the township $25 million in 12 yearly installments and would have paid the debts and cleanup costs owed by its operator, the Pennsauken Solid Waste Management Authority.

One-party rule, dredging the Delaware River, government mismanagement - these issues resurfaced throughout an hourlong debate last night of the seven Gloucester County freeholder candidates. All seven freeholders are Democrats, and three are up for reelection. They faced four challengers in the last public debate scheduled before Tuesday's election. Republicans Samuel Hart, Susan Graham and David Ferrucci and independent Joe LaPorta contended that an all-Democrat board had allowed high salaries in the Gloucester County Improvement Authority, out-of-state garbage at the landfill, and higher taxes for county residents.

The 56-acre Buzby Brothers landfill in Voorhees Township, a potential hazardous-waste site, remains, to the consternation of many local municipalities, a legal whirlpool that threatens them with unwanted litigation costs. Voorhees is seeking contributions from more than 20 South Jersey municipalities to pay for a remedial investigation feasibility study on the 37 acres the township owns. The state Department of Environmental Protection and Energy (DEPE), which in late October issued a directive demanding the study, estimates that it will cost $1.5 million.

There's a place for everything, and for 60 million cubic yards of things nobody wants, that place is the GEMS landfill in Gloucester Township. Work is under way on a court-ordered, $32.5 million cleanup of the site, but the crews in their white protective suits can't make the garbage disappear. The best the township can hope for, officials say, is that leaking poisons percolating through the 60-acre dump can be contained and treated, and that the rust-colored chemical plume flowing into nearby Briar Lake and Holly Run will go dry. "The leachate is always coming out and will always be coming out until we fix it," said Edward McClusick, the onsite representative of the state Department of Environmental Protection.

In 1988, in the Decade of the Deal, an artful deal was pulled together by the little borough of Kennett Square and Kennett, the township that surrounds it in southern Chester County. The proposal was to create a $1 million park on a 106-acre expanse on the north end of the borough reaching into the township. But there was - and is - one drawback: The land, between North Walnut and Leslie Streets south of the Route 1 bypass, holds a 23-acre landfill, closed now for 13 years.

The price tag on a $3.4 million section of the Burlington County landfill went up 13 percent last night when freeholders voted to spend almost $490,000 more to repair cracks found in the clay lining. County workers first noticed the damage in August, about two months after R.E. Pierson Construction Co. originally completed the last two sections of the landfill. A horizontal, half-inch crack stretched for about 110 feet along the sloped wall of the empty, basin-shaped cell.

A Gloucester County Superior Court judge ruled yesterday that the engineering report used to select South Harrison Township as the site of a new county landfill could be used in the redesignation of the site. The ruling came in a lawsuit filed March 26 by South Harrison Township that sought to have the redesignation of the site overturned. Township attorney Lewis Goldshore, in arguing pretrial motions in the case before Judge Edward S. Miller, said the report originally used to select the site should not have been used in the redesignation.

A state agency yesterday assured Falls Township that the state won't severely limit the amount of garbage that can be dumped at the GROWS landfill and thus saved the township from a large tax increase. The decision by the state Department of Environmental Resources means that Falls supervisors can approve the township's $10 million budget for 1990 without creating a fiscal crisis. The supervisors are scheduled to vote on the budget tonight. "I'm relieved," Supervisor Chairman John Domarski said yesterday.

The New Jersey Supreme Court has rejected South Harrison's last attempt in the state courts to block Gloucester County from running a landfill in the township, attorneys for the county and the township said yesterday. The high court refused the township permission to appeal a ruling by an appellate panel of judges that South Harrison's objections to construction and operation of the dump were without merit. The long, complicated case "is finally put to rest," said attorney Lewis Adler, an assistant to the county's environmental lawyer, Bruce Hasbrouck.