It’ll be another year yet before the 252-unit Haddon Towne Center project fully wraps its redevelopment of the former Dy-Dee Diaper Wash facility in Haddon Township.
But after 14 years, and with the first of its tenants starting to move into their new, Haddon Avenue addresses this weekend, state and local government officials were more than willing to celebrate a job mostly well done.
Calling the project “a poster child for success in partnership” among multiple levels of government and private enterprise, New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) Commissioner Bob Martin credited its principal players for their resilience in seeing it through.
Fieldstone won not only $3.5 million in NJDEP site remediation grants but also a 30-year, $15-million local PILOT agreement to help offset the cost of the $38-million project.
New Jersey has issued more than $111 million in grants and licensed 641 site remediation professionals for brownfield redevelopment since 2010, Martin said. In that time, the number of brownfield sites has fallen from more than 26,000 to 14,000, at least 30 of which are actively being studied in Camden County.
At first glance, Senior Consultant Jorge Berkowitz of Langan Engineering joked that he’d told developers from the Fieldstone Group that the Dy-Dee site could be cleaned up “in two years max. “It’s been 10 years since then,” he said Friday. “This is amazing as compared to what it was.”