Tainted soil at a proposed preschool site in Paterson prompts a messy legal battle
PATERSON — The Rev. William Bishop, a retired clergyman, faces a $25,000 fine because of contamination on the property where he wanted to open a preschool, a site used as a gas station decades ago.
That pending fine is entangled in a convoluted lawsuit Bishop filed against the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and William Morrissey III of Cedar Grove, the man who owned the property for about a decade from the 1980s to 1990s.
As part of the litigation, Morrissey has produced invoices from 1987 and 1988 saying he spent $6,000 to have an underground gasoline tank and the surrounding contaminated soil removed. Morrissey had that work done in order to build offices at the location, according to court records.
Bishop’s lawyer, Dennis Cummins Jr., cited those invoices as proof that the contamination from the gas station already had been resolved, prompting him to suggest that the pollution the DEP found came from some other nearby property. Cummins has maintained that Bishop should not be fined over contamination that either predated his ownership of the land or had come from somewhere else.
Now the legal battle may become even more complicated.
Cummins is seeking to expand the lawsuit to name as defendants the two entities that owned the property in between Morrissey and Bishop — the Community Action for Social Affairs nonprofit group and St. Luke’s Baptist Church — as well as a lawyer, Neil Chessen, and real estate broker, Linton Gaines, who worked on the land sale between St. Luke’s and Bishop.
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In letters filed in New Jersey Superior Court on Monday and last Friday, Cummins said he had been reluctant to name additional defendants in the lawsuit but said doing so would be the only way to resolve the dispute.
“I have always been hesitant to bring in a church, and attorney and a realtor, but after all is said,” Cummins wrote, “there is a need for everyone to be part of this unique situation.”
Cummins said in court papers that Bishop doesn’t have enough money to clean up the contamination and pay the $25,000 fine, which was imposed in March by Paterson Municipal Court. The lawyer is asking that the four parties who owned the land over the past four decades join with the state to do an investigation into where the contamination is coming from.
CASA, St. Luke’s, Chessen and Gaines could not be reached for comment for this story. Morrissey’s lawyer, Christopher Benevento, said his client fulfilled his responsibility 35 years ago by removing the contamination from the gas station.
“Luckily, my client retained the documents,” Benevento said of the old invoices. “Paterson no longer had them.”
The DEP, in its court filings in the past two months, has asserted that Bishop should have hired engineers to check for contamination before he bought the property. In a July 15 letter signed by New Jersey acting Attorney General Matthew Platkin, the state said Cummins was trying to create a “new defense” against the fine by calling for an investigation into whether the pollution is coming from other properties. Platkin objected to “any further delay” in resolving the status of the fine.
Bishop bought the land from St. Luke’s in 2015 for $500,000, including $340,000 from a mortgage, according to public records. That was the same price St. Luke’s paid in 2010 to buy the land from CASA, which paid Morrissey $274,000 for the property in 1997, according to real estate records.
In order to put a preschool on the site, Bishop needed to get the environmental assessment. That study was done in 2018 and found “hazardous substances, including benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylenes above the applicable standards,” according to DEP court filings.
Joe Malinconico is editor of Paterson Press.
Email: editor@patersonpress.com
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Paterson NJ: Tainted soil at a proposed preschool prompts legal battle
