NEARLY FIVE YEARS ago, a gaping sinkhole more than 30 feet wide opened near Roger DeGroat’s home in upper Ringwood, creating a safety and environmental hazard for DeGroat and his neighbors as well as for the entire surrounding community.

It was the latest in a series of environmental and governmental insults to plague upper Ringwood’s proud but struggling community of native American heritage over the past decade. These range from a Superfund cleanup that overlooked tons of toxic waste left by Ford Motor Company, to a landscape riddled with hazards from long-abandoned mines that have taken several lives over the years. Upper Ringwood’s children play in the midst of these unacceptable risks.

The sinkhole itself is believed to have resulted either from historical mining, with mines that were closed without proper state oversight, or from Ford’s first (and flawed) cleanup efforts under federal and state agencies.

This sad history of neglect seemed over when, soon after he took office, Gov. Jon Corzine came to upper Ringwood and to Roger DeGroat’s home. With much fanfare and a delegation of Cabinet officials in tow, the governor provided the borough government with the funds needed to address the sinkhole.

The borough pledged to do the work needed to make the DeGroat property safe. At the same time, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – spurred by Sen. Frank Lautenberg — was forcing Ford to undertake a proper cleanup of its toxic legacy in the borough.

Nightmare wasn’t over

As he shook Corzine’s hand for a photograph, DeGroat believed his family’s nightmare would soon be over, and the sinkhole would soon be gone.

Or so he thought. Corzine and those in his entourage are now gone from state government. But the sinkhole is little changed, and no safer, than when Corzine declared the problem solved and the solution funded.

What happened? Simply stated, the Borough of Ringwood diverted the funds to other uses, and even billed two different agencies for the same work. DeGroat’s calls for Ringwood to account for the funds never have been answered.

Instead, the borough convened a special meeting Monday night to sell its latest solution, which it describes (with actual but not intended irony) as its “Neighborhood Preservation Program. “ Under the NPP, Ringwood proposes to have DeGroat give the portion of his property with the sinkhole to the borough, consent to a subdivision of the property, and live with a fenced-off hazard next to his home.

The borough tried to paste a fig-leaf of public participation on the plan by convening a community advisory group as required by the state. The recommendations of the community were ignored, with the result that none on the advisory group spoke in favor of the NPP.

To be fair, the borough did not claim that the public process was anything other than an empty gesture. On the record, Borough Clerk Kelley Rohde declared that the NPP is the same plan that the borough had proposed years earlier, utterly uncontaminated by the input of the community.

Having been given the money to fix the problem, the borough now wants DeGroat to sacrifice his property to cover up the borough’s fiscal malfeasance. After a perfunctory hearing, the Ringwood Council voted unanimously to approve their plan. The entire process took less than half an hour, including the flag salute.

Pressing his case

While DeGroat and all of Upper Ringwood are used to broken promises, he is not giving up without a fight. He and his upper Ringwood neighbors fought a long fight to have public officials reopen the Ford cleanup and address decades of injustice.

DeGroat and others will continue the fight to have the borough honor its moral and legal obligation to fix the sinkhole.

And with a new governor plainly focused on fixing what is broken in state and local government, perhaps the state will finally take steps to hold the borough to its obligations, and honor the broken promise its agencies made to Roger DeGroat and Upper Ringwood.