This article was originally published in the February 2018 Trenton Downtowner.
The city seems to be drowning in bad news about the Trenton Water Works (TWW). And while Trenton citizens, elected officials in the communities relying on the TWW, state legislators, and state officials are lining up with a list of complaints, the Trenton City Council president, Zachary Chester, put the blame on an easy target, and Trenton Mayor Eric Jackson said those critics were all wet.
Trenton resident, former city council candidate, and often cited community activist Kevin Moriarty swimmingly summed up the situation in a statement presented at the January 16 City Council meeting.
The occasion was the council’s introduction of an ordinance that would allocate $6 million of capital funds for the Trenton Water works.
Moriarty writes on his blog, And Another Thing, that when the ordinance was introduced, there was no motion from council to advance and the ordinance was not introduced. However, he presented his remarks for the record — and mapped out the troubled waters.
“To approve this ordinance this evening would be an endorsement and vote of confidence in the current Trenton Water Works management, Trenton’s Department of Public Works, and the current administration. A vote of confidence they do not deserve,” said Moriarty.
His evidence was a series of newspaper articles reporting on TWW problems since 2014, when the Jackson administration began. He pointed out that the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection had cited the TWW for 16 violations, 12 of them in 2017.
Moriarty said that in October, 2017, NJ DEP took the City of Trenton to task for staffing the Water Works at only one-third the number of staff needed to operate its system, and that in January, 2018, outgoing DEP Commissioner Bob Martin wrote the city and said the “city’s inability or unwillingness to act with the urgency the current situation requires potentially puts at risk the health of the 225,000 people” served by the Water Works in Trenton and elsewhere in Mercer County.
“Even after that stinging notice, over the last weekend,” Moriarty said, “the Water Works screwed up again, issuing a conservation advisory and boil water notice on its website and sending out Reverse 911 calls to Trenton residents only well after neighboring townships informed their citizens of the problems, which are still in effect in parts of our service area.”
After saying that Trenton residents were adding the words “turbidity,” “haloacetic acid,” and “permanganate” to their vocabularies, he talked of another problem. “As an aside speaking of safety, today there is a Facebook home video, seen almost 15,000 times, before it was removed, which appears to show a person trespassing on the TWW intake plant on the river, and walking unimpeded for several minutes throughout the plant, inside and out. Not a door is locked, and not a security measure in place to stop this apparent intruder. This failure of on-site security is just the kind of thing that the federal homeland security department would consider a real problem, that the water system of a state capital supplying a quarter-million residents including a governor, legislature, and thousands of public employees would be so compromised,” said Moriarty.
Turning back to the ordinance, he then asked the council to postpone the ordinance for three reasons: Lack of trust in the TWW, public works, and the administration’s ability to fix the problem; reports that the TWW problems are managerial and operational rather than related to infrastructure; and the strong potential of a state taking over the operations.
‘The shortcomings at TWW are systemic and won’t be fixed overnight. But if the city can’t address the problems quickly, then the state should step in on an emergency basis.’
“The final reason goes back to the subject of Commissioner Martin’s letter last week,” said Moriarty. “He wrote to express the state’s frustration and impatience with the City of Trenton’s utter lack of movement in proceeding to seek and contract with an external entity to take over the management and daily operations of the utility.”
“The State of New Jersey has run out of patience with the City of Trenton,” he said. “As a (January 12 Times of Trenton article) put it, the DEP said it has chosen not to file a Superior Court compliant, due to the few days left in the Christie administration, but Martin said he’s already informed the new DEP commissioner nominee, Catherine McCabe, of the TWW situation, and the options she has for the ‘much needed corrective actions needed at TWW.’”
Morariy then added, “Council members, despite the city’s foot dragging, sooner or later — probably sooner, much sooner — an outside entity will take over the Water Works. With that prospect a near certainty, it’s going to be the case that this new management will generate its own list of capital equipment and project priorities. Don’t handicap them by approving this ordinance containing what is, frankly, a capital project list tainted by a failed TWW management and failed city administration.”
Some of Moriarty’s points were consistent with those made earlier that day by Democratic New Jersey Assemblyman Wayne DeAngelo. “It is simply unacceptable to put the public’s health at risk. No one in New Jersey should worry about the quality of their water coming out of their faucets. As the days continue to pass, TWW customers are being faced with increasingly alarming alerts about contamination levels, boil water directives, and conserving use. What they are not being told is how the problems will be fixed in the immediate future and how permanent solutions will be put in place to prevent such public health risks in the future.”
Then city officials responded. As reported by the Trentonian newspaper, City Council President Chester pointed to what he believes is the real problem. “The mayor can’t say it. I’ll say it. It’s my belief that Governor Christie on his way out wanted the city of Trenton to hire his people, the company he wants to pay off on his way out, to give a contract. That’s what I believe. And I said it. And I’ll say it again, because it’s the truth.”
The Trentonian added that Chester slammed outgoing DEP Commissioner Martin and the agency for talking to the newspapers over the boil-water advisory when he claimed the city had to run language in the notice by DEP before putting it out publicly and gave Jackson unreasonable deadlines to correct issues.
On January 12 the DEP told the city administration it failed to address operation and maintenance regulations; health and safety measures; an adequate emergency response plan; proper TWW staff; a 2014 order related to the reservoir; a readily available a written manual detailing procedures; and other technical and chemical-related practices.
“When you’re pointing fingers at the administration, point them at the state, too,” said Chester at the same meeting the council voted to ask the DEP for another TWW investigation. “They just wanted to get people riled up and upset, and they did it. Christie ran out of time, and he couldn’t get what he wanted. He ripped through Atlantic City, and he wanted to rip through Trenton.”
On January 18 Mayor Jackson issued a statement also pointing the blame elsewhere: “I want to clarify the status of the Trenton Water Works (TWW), and debunk the highly charged rhetoric and misinformation being circulated by individuals and news outlets with no technical background or knowledge.”
Jackson said the “TWW has operated according to state and federal standards, supplying water to its customers that either meets or exceeds federal standards.”
Admitting to “some temporary operational issues,” the mayor said the water quality and the public’s health were never in danger, and each issue was addressed “as we normally do, expeditiously, professionally, in concert with our high-quality contract consultants, and with the engagement of the NJDEP every step of the way.”
He said the city has been involved with discussions with DEP officials and staff regarding “its concerns with us of the need to correct staffing and other issues at the TWW,” and that the city was in the process of “contracting with a water management company with the expertise and know-how to run the water filtration plant.”
Jackson also said, “As mayor of the city, and in line with our residents’ direction, under no circumstances will I allow the State of New Jersey, nor any special interest groups, to force us to sell or privatize our utility for personal or other political gain.”
If Jackson’s statement was designed to mitigate concern and build confidence, it did not work. The following day, DeAngelo, along with fellow Mercer County Democrats State Senator Linda Greenstein and Assemblymen DeAngelo and Dan Benson, sent a letter to the NJDEP Commissioner-designate Catherine McCabe requesting a meeting to discuss the growing and well-documented problems at TWW.
“We are committed to protecting the public safety and health of our district’s residents. It is simply unacceptable for water quality and infrastructure to be failing the public so greatly and frequently,” they said. Meanwhile Mercer Senator Shirley Turner said she was introducing a bill outlining water company notification procedures.
Then on January 20, a Times of Trenton editorial noted, “Trenton Mayor Eric Jackson has tried to downplay the problems at TWW. But the DEP and other officials aren’t buying the mayor’s response and they have every right to be skeptical.”
Then the editorial opened the faucet: “It’s not like this is a new situation that the water department has suddenly discovered. Problems at TWW have been ongoing for quite some time. The shortcomings at TWW are systemic and won’t be fixed overnight. But if the city can’t address the problems quickly, then the state should step in on an emergency basis.”
So despite attempts of the administration to drown criticism with words, one thing seems to certain: the city is in hot water.
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