We’ll take Manhattan

A site that was once home to some of the nation’s top-secret atomic research – and later required an extensive environmental cleanup – is back under municipal control.

A contingent of several dozen federal officials gathered with Mayor John Madden, Borough Council members and municipal staff at the Middlesex Library on Oct. 11. At a roughly one-hour ceremony, the feds proclaimed the former Middlesex Sampling Plant (MSP) site remediated and congratulated redeveloper Claremont Development for its construction of a 318,620-square-foot distribution center on nearby acreage.

That facility includes 39 loading docks, 145 trailer spaces, and 246 car spaces on 21 acres.

Various speakers touted the effort to make the sites off Mountain Avenue useful again as an example of local and federal government working collaboratively.

Federal officials said paperwork was completed the previous evening to turn the MSP site over to borough ownership. The feds also publicly presented Madden and Claremont executive Jeff Bastow with the 2023 Federal Facility Excellence in Site Reuse Award.

Plaques handed out at the ceremony honored the parties involved “for creating partnerships to implement redevelopment plans for the MSP and adjacent property” that create municipal revenue, local jobs and hold other benefits.

Bastow said the distribution center site – which was formerly home to the Absolute auto salvage yard – has required a more than $20 million environmental cleanup, paid for partly by Claremont. The center is expected to open next year for business, but the firm is already making PILOT (Payment in Lieu of Taxes) payments to the borough.

Claremont’s project “epitomizes a public/private partnership,” Bastow said.

Less certainly surrounds the nine-acre MSP site’s future.

The MSP site was the home to uranium sampling, part of the Manhattan Project that led to the creation of the first atomic bomb.

The MSP process building was used between 1943-67 to sample uranium, beryllium, and thorium ore for the Atomic Energy Commission in the development of atomic weapons. That work was part of a top-secret nationwide fabricating effort during World War II to develop an atom bomb, and post-war, to create atomic weapons.

In later decades, the MSP site’s can of worms opened. It was discovered that radioactive soil, excavated during work at the site, had been disposed of at the now-former municipal landfill on Mountain Avenue and used as fill around the OLMV Church’s rectory.

There was also extensive soil removal at the MSP site itself, in order to make it useable again. The specific use remains an open issue.

At the council’s Oct. 10 meeting, borough officials explained that the MSP site’s remediation had met the federal standard of being clean enough for potential residential use.

“When you can clean a property to residential standards, that to me is extraordinary,” Madden said. “That means it’s very safe.”

The site can’t be used for residential purposes due to the stipulations under which the borough is taking ownership. But Madden said he’d have no qualms about theoretically building his home there, expressing confidence in the feds’ current assessment of the property. “Sure, I’d have no problem with that,” he said, noting that hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of soil had been removed from the site.

When asked, however, other council members would not state that they shared similar sentiment.

Madden said the borough’s potential uses for the property are restricted, because it was received at no cost. He said plans were drawn up several years ago to construct a new Department of Public Works (DPW) garage at the stie. Asked if personnel would be stationed there, he replied, “Yes,” later adding he would “have no problem putting personnel there.”

“We’ve got certification from the federal government,” Madden said. “You can’t get much better than that.”

On the morning of the award ceremony with federal officials, Borough Administrator Michael LaPlace had a different take.

LaPlace said any plans for a garage could be revisited. He acknowledged DPW personnel had expressed concerns about working at the site, adding that they would not be forced to do so.

A potential use for the MSP site is to store equipment there. LaPlace also theorized that a parking lot could be created there if a Middlesex train station is ever constructed nearby as has periodically been mentioned by officials in the past.