Sunday, October 01, 2006

When the Preferred Buyer is a Polluter


From The Times of Trenton:
HOPEWELL BOROUGH -- Brenda Goeke thought she had found the house of her dreams: a two-bedroom bungalow on a quiet street in desirable Hopewell Borough. Little did she know that her Somerset Street home was sitting on millions of gallons of polluted groundwater that could take decades to clean up.

Now Goeke, along with neighbors of the former Rockwell Industries plant that polluted the land, want the company to buy out their homes because they charge that the contamination has turned their slice of bucolic Mercer County into a worthless investment that no one will want to buy -- at least not for years to come.

"To be quite frank, Rockwell is not going to purchase any property because it all can be fixed," said Ulrike Williams, a corporate director of Rockwell Automation. "They are newer homes and the modifications are rather simple. They can be made -- we have seen it before."

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