The Legislature enacted the SRRA to address serious problems in the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s (“NJDEP”) site remediation program, which had a staggering backlog of some 20,000 pending clean-up cases and was widely considered to be broken. Budgetary constraints made it unrealistic for NJDEP to hire substantial numbers of additional case managers, so the Legislature sought to solve the problem with a system that uses private (and privately paid) independent consultants to oversee and approve remediation work, loosely patterned on Massachusetts’ program of licensed site professionals. During the political haggling among various stakeholders leading up to passage of the SRRA, some environmentalists warned that placing the responsibility for approval of a clean up in the hands of a consultant paid by the party responsible for the clean up was tantamount to “putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.” In their view, no one but a governmental employee could be trusted to supervise and approve a clean up.

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