Murphy appointees again dumping on Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood

In a move that will be remembered as one of the most cynical betrayals of environmental justice in recent New Jersey history, the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commissioners voted—6 to 2—to greenlight a fourth fossil-fuel power plant in Newark’s Ironbound.

That’s right. Not one. Not two. Not three. Four massive, pollutant-spewing monuments to bureaucratic inertia and systemic disregard for human life now stake their claim in a neighborhood already choking on the smog of indifference.

The location? 600 Wilson Avenue, ground zero for another layer of chemical insult in a working-class, immigrant-rich community that has endured a century of industrial degradation and come to the table—time and again—with science, solutions, and pleas for air their children can breathe.

And yet, once more, the doors have been slammed shut, the votes cast, the ink dried on a contract that spits in the face of everything we know about clean energy, climate change, and common decency.

The Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission (PVSC) is directed by a board that consists of nine members, all of whom are appointed by the Governor, with the advice and consent of the State Senate.

Brendan Murphy, Elizabeth Calabrese, John Cosgrove, James Doran, Joseph Isola, and Hector Lora: remember those names. The six commissioners who raised their hands and signed their names to another chapter in a long-running environmental horror show, rubber-stamped under the guise of “resiliency.”

This, they claim, is necessary infrastructure—an emergency backup generator in case the grid goes down, another reactionary relic born in the muddy wake of Superstorm Sandy. But don’t be fooled. This is no beacon of progress. It’s a gas-burning albatross on life support, designed not for the benefit of Newark residents, but for a bureaucratic status quo that refuses to adapt.

“It is very regrettable that the PVSC board of commissioners has chosen to vote against climate science, clean technology, and community voices,” said Melissa Miles, executive director of the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance. “Our goal is to avert the health impacts of another toxic gas plant in an already environmentally overburdened community.”

The facts don’t lie.

The Ironbound is home to New Jersey’s largest garbage incinerator, countless diesel-spewing trucks, contamination from the Diamond Alkali Superfund site, and now a fresh source of air degradation with the blessing of the very people charged with protecting public health.

One in four children in Newark suffers from asthma. One in four.

The air is thick with soot, particulates, and the stench of political compromise. And yet, PVSC claims the new plant will have a “negligible impact.” As if the cumulative weight of four fossil-fuel facilities can somehow be rendered inert with a public relations sleight-of-hand.

To be clear: this decision wasn’t made in a vacuum.

Activists, doctors, engineers, local legislators, and weeping mothers packed meeting rooms and inboxes, armed with data, testimony, and alternative solutions.

They pleaded for investment in real, clean infrastructure—solar, battery storage, microgrids, anything but another poison pump. But logic and empathy never stood a chance against the tangled knot of political appointments, backroom contracts, and technocratic apathy that define agencies like PVSC.

Make no mistake: these commissioners don’t live in the Ironbound. They don’t tuck their kids into bed near smokestacks or check their inhalers before every soccer game.

Senator Teresa Ruiz, Assemblywoman Eliana Pintor Marin, and Assemblywoman Shanique Speight claimed that Newark has “carried far more than its share of pollution and health impacts,” but their combined political clout was not applied to stop it.

Residents came out in force, but those voices fell on deaf ears.

The truth is harsher still: this isn’t just unfair—it’s calculated. The Ironbound was targeted because it’s politically expendable. After all, in New Jersey, environmental justice too often ends at the edge of a zip code.

This vote is more than a bad decision. It’s a moral collapse. A full-throated endorsement of the notion that some communities are fit to breathe clean air, while others are destined to suffocate quietly under the weight of industrial runoff, chemical residue, and hollow promises. A reminder that in the eyes of too many institutions, resilience means tolerating the intolerable.

“Once again, appointees of Governor Phil Murphy have decided to wreck the environment, this time by constructing a fourth power plant in a Newark neighborhood, where residents face a disproportionately high concentration of polluting industries, including power plants, a garbage incinerator, and contamination from abandoned manufacturing facilities like the Diamond Alkali Superfund site,” said progressive Democrat Lisa McCormick. “These citizens endure high rates of asthma, respiratory and cardiovascular problems, and other health issues, but they are being subjected to more environmental injustice.”

This project will burn natural gas and hydrogen, directly contradicting the state’s clean energy goals, causing dangerous increases in local air pollution and contributing to our deadly climate crisis.

The people of Newark deserve better than to be treated as collateral damage in someone else’s risk management strategy. They have demanded clean air, a seat at the table, and a future that doesn’t taste like carbon monoxide. What they’ve gotten instead is betrayal masquerading as necessity, and another plume of exhaust billowing into skies already heavy with history.

And so we are left with this: a power plant approved against the will of the people it will poison, defended by men and women who will never feel its consequences, and funded by public money that could have lit the way to a cleaner, smarter, more humane future. Instead, Newark gets more smoke.

Because in this version of the American dream, some neighborhoods only get to breathe once the deal’s done and the paperwork’s filed—if they’re lucky.