The Fights, the Money and What Happens When the Mountain Stops Growing

East Brunswick has been paid for hosting the landfill every year since 1985 — about $4.5 million in 2026. It has also been on the receiving end of recurring odour complaints documented from 1987 to 2019, a withdrawn plan to dig up old waste, two federal settlements and a school evacuation nearly four miles away. Both of those are the same story. And we could not find a published plan for what the mound becomes.

Part 4 of a four-part Eyes on EB series.

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This is the last installment, and it is the one where the record stops being tidy.

Part 1 described what the mound is. Part 2 explained how it got so big. Part 3 established that the original landfill closed on schedule and a second one was built on top of it.

This part covers the arguments, the money and the ending — and the ending is the part I cannot give you, because the documents do not agree with each other and no public source reconciles them.

Two things are worth saying before we start.

This is not a case for the landfill and it is not a case against it. The record contains a county health director calling it probably the most environmentally sound landfill in New Jersey, and residents telling a State Senate committee they were being treated like guinea pigs. Both of those are primary sources. Both are honest accounts. An article that uses only one of them is not reporting.

And the people who work there are not the defendants in this story. Every criticism that follows is of a decision, a design or a policy. When the County’s own health director looked at this facility in 1985, what he recorded about the operators was “excellent cooperation.”

The odours were there in 1987

The 2018–19 odour crisis is the one most people remember. It was not the first.

The 1987 engineering evaluation — the same report Part 3 is built on — recorded the problem and diagnosed its cause in a single sentence:

At that point gas collection and flaring operated on Section 1 only. An application was pending for Section 2. For Section 3, nothing had been submitted at all.

Odour was not the only thing the engineers wrote down. The same evaluation documented litter, inadequate cover, and leachate seeps on the north and east slopes — the operating problems Part 2 flagged and left for this installment.

That is thirty-two years before the school evacuation, with the same mechanism named: gas control lagging behind filling.

1993

If you were going to pick one year in this landfill’s history to read closely, it would be 1993.

In April of that year alone, the Middlesex County Board of Health logged 173 odour complaints. For scale: the County Health Director logged ten in the six months to July 1985, and MCUA logged 183 across two months in late 2018.

That spring, EDI and MCUA applied to exhume and rebury old waste — approximately 738,000 cubic yards across 41 acres sitting outside the cut-off wall. The South River Environmental Commission demanded that the state reject the application. South River and Sayreville councils moved resolutions against it.

It was withdrawn. A citizen account filed with a legislative committee described how:

⚠ How much waste actually lies outside the cut-off wall is unresolved. The 1987 report calls it “small areas of previously deposited waste.” The 1993 acreage figures come from the citizens’ characterisation of the application, not from a document we hold. Those two accounts are far apart and we cannot close the gap.

And on May 26, 1993, the New Jersey Senate Environment Committee held a hearing in South River. As far as our research can establish, it was the first legislative hearing held specifically on this landfill — the 1985 hearing in Part 2 was about interdistrict waste flow generally.

The committee’s chair opened it this way:

What the 1993 hearing was actually about

The specific grievance was sludge. MCUA was using a sludge-derived product as daily cover on the landfill, and the smell was attributed to it.

A legislator told the committee that Edgeboro was “the only landfill in the State of New Jersey, and perhaps in EPA Region II, that uses sludge as daily cover,” and relayed a state assistant commissioner’s assessment from the previous week: “they are not even using it as cover. The cover has become so thick that it cannot even be justified as being used as cover. In fact, the MCUA is dumping sludge daily onto the landfill in violation of State law.” The same witness said residents were being treated “as guinea pigs.”

⚠ Those are legislator claims made in testimony, not findings. We have found no violation notice supporting the “in violation of State law” characterisation, and we are not going to present one as established.

What the state said in response is documented, and it mattered. Deputy Commissioner Jeanne M. Fox told the committee that complaints “have resulted primarily from the use of the sludge-derived product as cover on the landfill,” that the department would require odour-control procedures “including the use of a deodorizing agent” — and then made a commitment:

A state scientist also gave the committee a health finding. Dr. Iclal Atay of the NJDEP Bureau of New Source Review testified that with the flares operating, “the cancer risks would be less than one-in-a-million for those substances that we have done the calculations for.” He named the odour agents as “hydrogen sulfide, mercaptans,” which “give you a feeling of illness; however, as soon as you move away from the odor, that feeling of sickness stops” — while noting the agency was still testing for substances that “may cause serious illnesses.”

⭐ Hold onto both of those. They come back in 2019 and 2024, almost unchanged.

One document we do not have

Testimony filed with that committee quoted an internal state memorandum, written by a departmental director of legislative affairs to the Commissioner, about a March 1993 meeting in South River. As quoted, it characterised residents as “an interesting lot” of “low socio-economic status” and “non-technical, non-intellectually sophisticated people,” described local officials as “mavericks” and “renegades,” and advised the Commissioner to keep his “distance.”

⛔ We do not hold that memo. Every phrase above reaches us second-hand, through a citizen statement filed with a legislative committee. We are recording that it was quoted into the public record of a Senate hearing — which is a fact — and explicitly not presenting it as a document we have read.

The same facility, described two ways, eight years apart

Put the two accounts side by side, because this is the most useful thing in the entire environmental record.

Neither of these cancels the other, and it is a mistake to try to make them.

The 1985 letter is describing engineering — a cut-off wall, a leachate system, a gas system, cooperative operators — and it is accurate about those things. The 1993 testimony is an account of what it was like to live beside a facility whose volume and practices had changed. We are not in a position to certify every characterisation in it — but the complaint counts behind it are official, and the state’s own response treated the underlying problem as real.

A facility can be well engineered for its era and overwhelmed, and it can be run cooperatively and produce a smell that reaches the next town. The record says all of those things at once.

1994: the odour gets written into an enforceable order

The 1993 hearing had a documented result, and it is the part of this history that seems to have been forgotten.

On December 23, 1994, after contested litigation, an Administrative Consent Order was executed between MCUA and the state department — OAL Docket No. ESW-08866-93S. It governs the sludge-derived product in exactly the structure Deputy Commissioner Fox had described eighteen months earlier:

• daily cover capped at 500 cubic yards a day, about nine inches per lift
• intermediate cover capped at 200 cubic yards a day at a 50:50 sludge-to-soil mix
• if odour unreasonably interferes with the enjoyment of life or property, MCUA must mix 50:50
• if odour persists, MCUA must cease all use of the product

The order terminated when the facility’s permits were renewed, with its conditions carried into the permit itself.

Odour was an enforceable permit condition at this landfill a quarter of a century before the 2018–19 crisis.

2010: two federal settlements

Part 3 quoted the EPA’s finding that the stacked design “contributed to challenging environmental compliance issues.” This is the enforcement that came with it.

In July 2010, the EPA settled with Edgeboro Disposal, Inc., Edgeboro Inc. and two gas-system operators over Clean Air Act violations at the closed landfill. Penalties were $750,000, and EDI built a new $6 million landfill gas collection and control system. The agency had determined that the old system was inadequate, that excessive landfill gas was escaping, that pollution control devices were not being operated properly and that various monitoring was not being done.

In August 2010, the EPA settled separately with MCUA and two more gas operators over the active landfill. Those defendants collectively paid a civil penalty of more than $1.3 million. MCUA installed 19 additional gas collection wells in its newest cell and agreed to a surface methane monitoring plan.

Two settlements, two months apart, two sets of defendants — because, as Part 3 explained, there are two landfills here and in 2010 the federal government was still treating them as having different owners.

2018–19: the school, and an irony

In December 2018, a school in North Brunswick was evacuated on suspicion of a gas leak.

There was no leak. The smell was the landfill, almost four miles away.

From November 2018, MCUA documented 183 odour-related complaints, including landfill gas smelled twice on George Street in New Brunswick. At a packed public meeting in January 2019, MCUA’s executive director attributed the odour to hydrogen sulfide and gave two causes: higher than normal rainfall in 2018 seeping into the waste mass, and drilling and construction inside the mound.

The drilling was for a new odour control system.

⚠ Those explanations are the operator’s account, given at a public meeting, and not independently verified here. He cited readings of five parts per billion against “an anticipated regulatory limit of 30 ppb,” saying “We are operating well below what we perceive these limits to be” — and the hedge in that phrasing is his, not ours. He also said “The rotten egg smell is bad for your nose, but very little else.”

Residents at the same meeting disputed how complaints were being scored. One said that when residents called, inspectors visited and rated an odour a 1 or 2 where the residents rated it a 4 or 5.

The odour control system was completed in summer 2019 — about 20,000 linear feet of piping around the mound’s perimeter with vaporiser units. ⚠ MCUA describes it as the first of its kind in New Jersey and describes it as effective; those are the operator’s claims about its own installation.

⭐ Note what carried across thirty-one years. In 1993 a state scientist named hydrogen sulfide as the odour agent and gave a less-than-one-in-a-million cancer risk finding. In 2024, MCUA reported a facility-wide risk assessment against that same one-in-a-million threshold, and its executive director had named hydrogen sulfide in 2019. ⚠ The 2024 figure is MCUA’s summary of its own consultant’s report, which we have not obtained.

The money

East Brunswick has received host community benefits since 1985, under a state law providing a minimum of one dollar per ton to the host municipality.

Here is the series, from the Township’s own bond disclosures and MCUA’s budgets:

• 1986 — $3,063,000
• 1987 — $1,094,302 ⚠ a sharp, unexplained dip
• 1988 — $2,300,000 · 1989 — $3,150,000 · 1990 — $3,560,000
• 1991 through 2001 — $4,600,000 every single year
• 2002 — $4,850,000 · 2005 — $4,837,998 · 2008 — $4,193,238
• 2009 — $5,031,945 ⭐ the highest single year in the series
• 2010 — $3,728,584 ⭐ a fall of about 26% in one year
• 2014 — $4,282,501 · 2019 — $4,340,340
• 2026 — $4,537,000 budgeted

Two of those need flagging honestly. The 1987 collapse to about a million dollars is not explained by anything we hold — it coincides with the year the private landfill reached capacity and the County restructured control, but no document connects them. And the 26% drop in 2010, straight after the highest year on record, is not explained either. We looked.

And an eleven-year run at exactly $4,600,000 is not what a per-ton payment produces on its own. Something was fixing that number. We could not establish what.

The “$3 million or $4 million” question

If you have heard officials describe this payment, you may have heard two different numbers. Both are correct, and the reason is bookkeeping rather than disagreement.

MCUA budgets one combined figure for East Brunswick. The Township books it as two separate revenue lines — a “Host Benefit Fee MCUA” line and a separate “MCUA Fees – Added” line. In 2025 those two lines were $3,090,000 and $1,416,870, which is $4,506,870 — against MCUA’s single budgeted figure of $4,507,000.

So a council member describing “about $3 million a year” is quoting the first line. A mayor describing “about four million dollars a year” is quoting the total. Neither is wrong.

Who else gets paid, and who does not

East Brunswick is not the only municipality receiving money. MCUA budgets a separate adjoining host community benefit to three neighbours:

⭐ All three adjoining payments fall while East Brunswick’s rises.

And one city appears to receive nothing. In 2019 it was reported that New Brunswick — less than a mile from the landfill — received no payment at all. MCUA’s 2025 and 2026 budgets list adjoining host community benefits for Edison, Sayreville and South River only. We found no source establishing a payment to New Brunswick.

MCUA also pays $3,500,000 a year to the County as an implementing agency fee and $2,750,000 to the County improvement authority for recycling. Tipping fees rose over 2022–26 from $70 to $75 a ton at the first tier and $73 to $78 at the second.

Why East Brunswick wants the landfill to continue

It would be easy to assume the answer is simply the $4.5 million. The record gives at least four reasons, and the money is only one of them.

1. Proximity is worth money on the other side of the ledger too. The Township is also a customer — it pays MCUA tipping fees every month. As a council member put it in 2026: “other towns that are further away from the dump, their increases are higher… because their trucks have to drive to the landfill. So, it is a benefit to us that it’s close.”

2. The host community benefit. About $4.5 million a year.

3. The landfill is load-bearing in East Brunswick’s affordable-housing position. ⭐ In January 2025 the Township removed 129.5 of 174 developable acres from its Round 4 obligation calculation — with page after page of the supporting appendix labelled “MCUA Property – Landfill” and “MCUA Property – Wetlands & Landfill.”

4. The Township runs its own recycling and compost centre on the same campus.

The Council’s own position, on camera in April 2026, is not ambiguous: “We need to keep that landfill available as long as possible.”

⛔ One premise we went looking for and could not support: that East Brunswick planned around a closure that never came. We found no evidence of it. The Township’s bond disclosures told investors the revenue would continue, and its governing body says out loud that it wants the landfill’s life extended.

What closure actually involves

Closure is not switching something off. It is a construction project followed by a thirty-year obligation.

• A six-layer final cap over the mound.
• Thirty years of post-closure maintenance and monitoring after closure.
• $84.2 million recorded as closure and post-closure care liabilities at the end of 2023, against total costs estimated at approximately $137 million — up from around $99 million as recently as 2021.
• $84,249,099 held in restricted cash and investments against it.
• $77.5 million of reserve and closure funding in the 2026 five-year capital plan, with major spending scheduled into 2031.
• Edgeboro I is a live, shared obligation. Closure and post-closure of the closed landfill underneath is still shared with Edgeboro Disposal, Inc., funded principally from escrowed money established by its owners out of tipping fees.
• Gas collection continues after closure. MCUA already collects gas from a closed regional landfill as well as the active one.
• Partial closure is already happening — side-slope closure projects were built in 2021.

We could not find a published plan for what the mound becomes

This is a real gap, and it is worth naming plainly.

We found no published plan for the end use of the site. In 2019 a regional news outlet reported that officials had no public plan for what would happen after closure. Nothing we located since contradicts that.

⚠ Closed landfills elsewhere have become parks, solar arrays and open space. None of that is documented for Edgeboro, and we are not going to imply it is. What we can say is that a 247-acre landform inside a 315-acre site, in a township with very little developable land left, will eventually stop taking waste — and that no public document we found says what happens then.

So when does it actually end?

Here is where the record refuses to resolve, and the honest thing is to show you the disagreement rather than pick a year.

Three figures, from the same operator, that do not fit together:

1. “Through 2030.” MCUA’s audited financial statements state that a September 2017 permit approval allows operation of the landfill through 2030. That language repeats unchanged across the 2020, 2021 and 2023 audits. It matches the County’s own 2016 public notice, which said the 55-foot height increase “will extend the life of the Landfill until about year 2030.” 2. Vertical filling beginning in 2028. MCUA’s September 2024 presentation states that a vertical capacity increase in the Solid Waste Facility Permit is “anticipated to begin in 2028.” Its August 2024 filings describe raising total design capacity from 18,856,092 to 21,656,092 megagrams — an increase of about 15% — pending state approval. 3. Closure spending scheduled into 2031. The 2026 capital plan carries $77.5 million of reserve and closure funding with major spend running into 2031.

A vertical expansion that starts filling in 2028 is hard to square with a landfill that stops accepting waste in 2030. No public source we found reconciles them. ⛔ And we are not going to calculate a year ourselves — the airspace-versus-mass distinction makes that arithmetic unsafe, and a number we invented would be worse than an honest gap.

There is also a nearer date worth knowing: the MCUA disposal agreements expire on December 31, 2026.

Separately, East Brunswick told bond investors in at least four Official Statements — 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2020 — in identical words, that it would receive host community benefits “for the next twenty years which is the life expectancy of the landfill.” Read literally that is 2034, then 2035, then 2037, then 2040. ⚠ That is almost certainly un-updated boilerplate rather than four separate forecasts, and it should not be read as officials moving a goalpost. What it does show is that the Township never reconciled its own investor disclosure with the County’s figure.

What this series establishes

Across four installments, from permits, engineering reports, hearing transcripts, audits, budgets and federal enforcement records:

The mound on Edgeboro Road is two landfills. A private one that operated from 1954, was capped and closed, and a county one permitted in 1991 and opened in 1992 on top of it.

East Brunswick did not choose to become a regional disposal site. Three Middlesex County landfills went out of service inside about eighteen months, and state emergency orders sent the waste to the one that was left. The County litigated against those orders and lost.

The original landfill did not operate past its legal end date. That date was written into a permit in January 1984.

The stacked design had costs, and the federal regulator said so in writing. It also roughly doubled the site’s usable life, which is why it was chosen.

Odour is the through-line of the record — identified by engineers in 1987, raised at a Senate hearing in 1993, written into an enforceable order in 1994, and still the subject of 183 complaints in 2018–19.

The facility has been described honestly in incompatible ways by people who were there. Both descriptions are in the record and both belong in it.

The money is real, it is substantial, and parts of it are unexplained — including a 26% single-year fall that no document we hold accounts for.

And the end is not settled. The operator’s own documents point at 2030, 2028 and 2031, and nothing reconciles them. We found no published plan for what the site becomes afterward.

⛔ We are not filing a public records request off any of this. Eyes on EB reserves those for evidence of wrongdoing, concealment or a serious accountability problem. What we found instead is a seventy-year institutional history that is more complicated, and considerably more interesting, than the version most of us carry around — including the version I had before I started reading.

If you take one thing from the series, make it this. The mountain on Edgeboro Road is not a mystery and it is not a scandal. It is the physical record of decisions that were made in public, are written down, and can be read.

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THE SERIES

• PART 1 — What Is That Mountain on Edgeboro Road? — Read part 1
• PART 2 — How Edgeboro Got So Big — Read part 2
• PART 3 — The Landfill That Actually Did Close — Read part 3
• PART 4 — The Fights, the Money and What Happens When the Mountain Stops Growing — Current installment

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Eyes on EB builds its reporting from original records. This installment draws on the transcript of the May 26, 1993 New Jersey Senate Environment Committee hearing on the Edgeboro Landfill; the April 1987 Edgeboro Landfill Evaluation prepared by Malcolm Pirnie, Inc.; the December 23, 1994 Administrative Consent Order, OAL Docket No. ESW-08866-93S; the NJDEP Solid Waste Facility Permit for the Middlesex County Landfill; United States Environmental Protection Agency enforcement releases of July and August 2010; MCUA audited financial statements and adopted budgets; MCUA’s September 2024 public information session and its 2024 Title V public notice; Township of East Brunswick Official Statements, budgets and council records; the Township’s January 2025 affordable-housing filing; and contemporaneous journalism. Where our sources disagree, where a figure is an estimate, or where a claim is an operator’s account of its own performance, we have said so.