Chloe Desir of the Ironbound Community Corporation choked back tears as she spoke against a proposed backup power plant for the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission treatment plant in Newark’s already heavily industrialized but densely populated Ironbound section. She spoke via Zoom during a hearing of the PVSC board on Thursday, June 12, 2025.
Zoom
In the face of overwhelming and sometimes tearful opposition from the public, the
Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission
voted Thursday to move ahead with a gas-fired backup power plant at its Newark treatment facility.
The 6-2 vote by the PVSC board authorized staff to award a contract for a
“standby power generation facility
‚” capping a six-hour Zoom meeting that included 69 members of the public who spoke. All but six of them were opponents of the project who live in the Ironbound neighborhood surrounding the commission’s immense treatment plant or environmental justice advocates weighing in on their behalf.
“It’s environmental racism,”
Maya Pontón Aronoff
, a Hudson County-based activist, told the nine commissioners. “When is enough enough? When will officials stand up against the brutalization of Newark and of New Jersey’s most vulnerable communities?”
PVSC Chairman Brendan Murphy
was joined by commissioners Elizabeth Calabrese, John J. Cosgrove, James P. Doran, Joseph F. Isola and Hector C. Lora in the vote to authorize the contract award.
PVSC Vice Chairman
Luis Quintana
, a Newark city councilman, was joined by Commissioner
C. Lawrence Crump
, Newark’s council president, in dissent.
“My suspicion based on the information we’ve received,” Crump said before the vote, “this power plant is not necessary.”
Opponents say the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission’s proposed backup power plant would further pollute the air in Newark’s already “overburdened” Ironbound section, a heavily industrialized yet densely populated area.
Image by DEP
Quintana said he would listen to the “hue and cry of the citizens in the city in which I live” and likewise vote against the project.
There was no public discussion of the status of any contract talks, with whom they might be going on, when the contract would be awarded, or how much it would be worth. Murphy called for a closed session just before the vote authorizing the award of a contact, though he did not say what was discussed during the session.
The board adopted a separate resolution stipulating that, apart from monthly testing, the power plant would operate only in the event of emergencies and would not be capable of exporting power outside the treatment facility. It said operators would not seek permission to redesign the plant or operate it for commercial power generation.
The measure is intended to allay fears that the plant would operate regularly to generate electricity for sale to power companies as a PVSC revenue source.
The new power plant, estimated to cost $180 million, would be built next to PVSC’s existing Newark facility on Wilson Avenue. The state Department of Environmental Protection
granted a permit
for the plant in April, just after the federal Environmental Protection Agency reviewed the project and had
no objections
.
The plant has been highly controversial since it was
proposed four years ago
to avoid the kind of power outage, temporary plant shutdown, and damage to its treatment capability that let half a billion gallons of raw and partially treated sewage flow into Newark Bay after saltwater flooded the plant during Superstorm Sandy in 2012.
A flood wall has been built around the plant since then, and the plant’s on-site electrical transfer station has been elevated higher above ground. Even so, the commission insists that the backup power plant, estimated to cost more than $150 million, is still needed.
But residents of Newark’s surrounding Ironbound section, plus a broad coalition of elected officials, health experts, fossil fuel critics and others insist the methane-burning backup plant would add to the pollution and elevated rates of asthma and other illnesses aggravated by three existing methane-burning plants and nearby Newark Liberty International Airport and the Port Newark container terminal.
One after another, opponents told commissioners that the project flew in the face of the state’s environmental justice law, intended to protect communities already “overburdened” by polluters from additional sources. And some criticized
Gov. Phil Murphy
as a hypocrite for allowing the state DEP to permit the backup plant after he had
signed the law in 2020 in Newark
.
The city’s mayor,
Ras J. Baraka
, a staunch Murphy ally who just
lost a primary bid
to succeed him as governor, was among Murphy’s critics on the power plant issue.
“I am disappointed in the Murphy administration for allowing this to go on,” Baraka told commissioners, whom he urged — in vain, it turned out — to “find the courage to do the right thing.”
Baraka had been contemplating a lawsuit to halt the project, and after Thursday’s vote, Newark Corporation Counsel Kenyatta Stewart, the city’s top lawyer, said one was coming.
“We are in the process of getting research together and intend to drop a complaint in the near future,” Stewart vowed in a statement.
Other Murphy allies, including Newark residents State
Sen. Teresa Ruíz
and
Assemblywoman Eliana Pintor
, both Essex Democrats, persuaded the PVSC board to postpone the original May 15 date for the vote in an attempt to broker a compromise of some sort, also without success.
Referring to the Ironbound air quality’s stifling impact on her three daughters, Pintor told commissioners, “I’m the one who cannot open their window in the summertime.”
Chloe Desir, a policy analyst with the Ironbound Community Corporation, choked back tears as she told commissioners that the neighborhood’s asthma rate was three times the national average.
Most of the nine board members said little to nothing during the meeting, which Desir and others labeled as quiet acquiescence to behind-the-scenes pressure that would have grave consequences for Ironbound families.
“Your silence is violence,” Desir said.
Lora, the PVSC commissioner and mayor of Passaic, was the board’s lone spokesman in defense of the project and, even then, an unenthusiastic one.
He acknowledged that the health concerns of the ironbound’s 50,000 residents were real. But, he added, so were potential consequences of a sewage plant shutdown resulting in the discharge of undertreated wastewater or backed-up toilets for the 1.6 million homes and businesses and 3.4 million people in northern New Jersey who rely on the PVSC to flush their e-coli and other bacteria away.
“If it occurs,” Lora said of a shutdown, “I can’t turn to families with sewage running through their homes and say I’m sorry, we were waiting for somebody to come up with a solution.”
He also rejected critics’ assertions that there was something to be gained politically or financially by commissioners for approving the plant or that “any of my colleagues have a racist bone in any of their bodies.”
“Over the years, commissioners requested alternative solutions, options, many times,” Lora said. But he added, “We’ve had professionals say to us, right now, this is the most viable option.”
But opponents of the backup power plant, including several representatives of the nonprofit law firm
Earthjustice
(“Because the Earth needs a good lawyer”), said a cleaner, cheaper alternative to a backup power plant exists right now in the form of a reserve battery power facility.
The six members of the public who spoke in favor of the project were mainly union or construction trade group officials.
“If the power went off today, which could absolutely happen again, there would still be no alternate power supply,” said Christian Hartman, senior vice president of the
New Jersey Alliance for Action
, which represents commercial, public and nonprofit developers.
But opponent Richard Grant questioned the logic and morality of the polluting backup plant.
“It is wrong,” Grant said, “to actually harm people to prevent a potential harm.”
To boost the resiliency of the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission treatment plant in Newark, the PVSC built a flood wall around the facility intended to protect against the kind of storm surge that flooded and shut down the plant during Hurricane Sandy. On Thursday, the PVSC board authorized staff to award a contract for an on-site backup power plant to make the facility even more resilient.
Steven Rodas | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
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