The Crowne Plaza Secaucus Not Helping The Dirty Jersey Stereotypes
We were born and raised in the Garden State and it's always been understood that Secaucus just smells bad. Imagine bringing your boyfriend home to meet your family and a few minutes after you leave Newark Airport, he's assaulted by a pungent stench in the air. Nervously, you tell him: "Oh that's just Secaucus. It always smells like that. Out where we live, it doesn't smell at all." Then you continue to blame Secaucus for any other bad smells he encounters in New Jersey.
But it's true. Secaucus has always smelled bad, due to the landfills in the area and decades of environmental abuse that the marshlands have suffered. Fortunately, in recent years there's been a large environmental rescue effort going on here to save the marshlands from being just a nasty dumping ground. So when a hotel is accused of pumping sewage into the area's Hackensack River, it's pretty shocking--even for Jersey.
The Crowne Plaza Secaucus has been charged by the New Jersey state attorney general with just that--dumping wastewater contaminated with sewage into the Hackensack River, a flagrant violation of the New Jersey Water Pollution Control Act. The Star-Ledger reports:
According to an indictment handed up today in Mercer County, RD Secaucus LLC, which does business as Crowne Plaza Hotel and Rosdev Hospitality Secaucus, violated the New Jersey Water Pollution Control Act between January 2008 and June of this year, when state investigators, acting on a tip from Hackensack Riverkeeper Bill Sheehan, discovered an underground tunnel system in which raw sewage leaking from hotel pipes was flushed into the river, the state Attorney General Office said today.
The Crowne Plaza has denied any knowledge of this sewer system and said the indictment against them has been "a major disappointment to every one of us at working the hotel." The hotel probably will have to pay a $75,000 fine but it could also be responsible for paying a fine for each day the hotel was in violation of the pollution act. The hotel is looking to take the matter to trial and have called the prosecution's charges "without sound basis." The hotel also stated that the health of guests at the hotel or anyone in the area has not been affected.
Still, we're going to go ahead and leave them off our Green Hotels list for now.
[Background photo: David Pfeffer]
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