On April 25, 2025, the Superior Court of New Jersey, Appellate Division (the “Appellate Division”) in New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection et al. v. Desai et al., ruled on the statute of limitations for state claims brought under the New Jersey Spill Compensation and Control Act (the “Spill Act”), finding that claims concerning remediation do not begin to accrue until the remediation is complete.

The subject case stems from remediation that began in 1987, when the International Consumer Corporation (ICC), a solvent repacking business, closed operations at its site in Camden, New Jersey (the “Site”). Remediation as necessitated by the Industrial Site Recovery Act (ISRA), then called the Environmental Cleanup Responsibility Act, was initiated in 1987 and continued in fits and starts until 1998, when the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) ultimately terminated a Memorandum of Agreement it had with ICC to clean up the Site. ICC’s remediation at the Site was never completed, even after additional notification from NJDEP in 2010 informing ICC of its continuing obligation to do so.

NJDEP filed a complaint against ICC parties on April 20, 2023 pursuant to ISRA and the Spill Act seeking to compel ICC to remediate the site and to reimburse NJDEP for damages it has and will incur resulting from ICC’s failure to fulfill its statutory remediation obligations. ICC moved to dismiss, asserting, in relevant part, that NJDEP’s complaint was untimely. In an oral decision, a trial court agreed with ICC, finding that the Spill Act’s three-year statute of limitations on State claims “accrued on the day ‘any portion of remedial action’ began on the Site.” The trial court granted ICC’s motion to dismiss on August 4, 2023.

The Appellate Division looked to the express language of the Spill Act in reaching its holding. The relevant provision, N.J.S.A. 58:10B-17.1(a)(1) states that “any civil action concerning the remediation of a contaminated site…commenced by the State pursuant to the State's environmental laws shall be commenced within three years next after the cause of action shall have accrued.” The statute then clarifies that, in determining whether the action was commenced within this timeframe, “no cause of action shall be deemed to have accrued prior to January 1, 2002 or until the contaminated site is remediated…whichever is later.” N.J.S.A. 58:10B-17.1(a)(2). The Appellate Division zeroed in on the legislature’s use of “remediated”, noting that under a plain meaning interpretation, use of the past tense supports the position that the State’s cause of action does not accrue until remediation is completed.

The court also found it convincing to examine provisions of the Spill Act setting the statute of limitations for State natural resource damage (NRD) claims at N.J.S.A. 58:10B-17.1(b). For NRD claims, the legislature expressly specified that “no cause of action shall be deemed to have accrued prior to January 1, 2002 or until the completion of the remedial action for the entire contaminated site or the entire sanitary landfill facility, whichever is later.” N.J.S.A. 58:10B-17.1(b)(2). The Appellate Division found that this provision, when taken in context of the Spill Act’s legislative history, indicated an overarching intent to apply all statutes of limitations for State Spill Act claims from the point in time at which remediation has been completed.

As a result of this interpretation, because ICC never competed remediation at the Site, the applicable three-year statute of limitations never began to run. The Appellate Division therefore reversed the trial court’s approval of ICC’s motion to dismiss and remanded for proceedings consistent with its interpretation.

This decision highlights the deference that the Appellate Division gives to the plain language of the statute and resolves a point of ambiguity regarding this statute of limitations under the Spill Act. The case is N.J. Dep’t of Envtl. Prot. et al. v. Desai et al., case number A-0140-23 (App. Div. Apr. 25, 2025).

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