When Manchester Was Broke: How Tainted Water Revealed Corruption

MANCHESTER, NJ — Sabina Martin remembers the days of lugging 5-gallon jugs to the Manchester Volunteer Fire Department’s firehouse to fill them with a day’s worth of water.

It was 1988. Chemical contamination had been found in the wells of the 1,600 homes in the Pine Lake Park section of the township the previous year, as people who were selling their homes had them tested to meet a new state requirement.

Martin, who retired earlier this year after 27 years of working for Manchester Township, including the last 15 as the township clerk, was a mom raising three young children at the time, and the township’s water crisis was turning everyone’s lives upside down.

“We would take towels and shower every time we went to see family,” Martin said, because they couldn’t use the water for drinking or showering, and they were warned not to breathe the steam.

The contamination had Pine Lake Park residents looking for help, she said, and the first place they turned was the township government, led by business administrator Joseph S. Portash.

“We don’t have any money to help you,” Martin says was the essence of what Portash told residents back then. It raised questions.

“We were paying a lot of money in taxes,” she said, and there had been a few bond approvals earmarked for various projects. Martin and other residents started asking questions.

The answers changed the town’s history and left a scar that runs as deep as the chemical contamination.

‘Nothing for our money’

Joe Portash first came to power in Manchester in the 1960s when he was elected to the then-Township Committee. Articles from the early 1990s credit him with turning the town into a haven for retirees, thanks in part to deals he made with developer Robert J. Schmertz, who then owned the NBA’s Boston Celtics and Leisure Technology, which built hundreds of homes in age-restricted communities including Leisure Village West.

It was Portash’s dealings with Schmertz that landed him in hot water in the mid-1970s, when he was convicted of taking a bribe while serving on the then-Board of Freeholders. That conviction later was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court because the prosecutor had used testimony Portash gave under an immunity agreement to convict him, according to the court ruling and reports from newspaper archives.

It was a preview of things to come for Manchester, however.

Martin said she was among a group of Pine Lake Park residents who started going to township meetings, first asking for help then as time went on, loudly demanding it.

At the same time, they started going to town hall and requesting information about various bonds the town had purchased for projects, including roadwork and water and sewer lines.

“We’d go at different times” to get information so as not to arouse suspicion of what they were researching, she said.

“We’d go out and check on the projects where the money was supposed to be spent, and find the project was never touched,” Martin said.

There were horrendous potholes all over, so bad they joked to the kids to be careful because they risked falling in one and showing up somewhere else.

“We weren’t getting anything for our money,” she said.

‘The center of the doughnut’

“Pine Lake Park was a collection of cheap houses built along bumpy, sometimes unpaved roads carved out of the Pinelands in the mid-1960s,” Thomas Peele wrote in a 2013 recollection of the Portash era. Peele was just starting his journalism career in 1988, working for the Ocean County Observer, which was a daily paper back then.

Pine Lake Park “surrounded a flooded gravel pit with the imaginative name of Pine Lake. The homes were built without a public water system. Each came with a well tapping the giant Kirkwood-Cohansey Aquifer.”

Peele started at the Observer as the water crisis was forcing Sam Martin and the hundreds of other Pine Lake Park residents to shower at Surf and Stream Campground, which opened its showers to the community, and lug 5-gallon jugs to fill with water for daily cooking, handwashing and drinking.

“We used about 15 gallons a day,” Martin said, sometimes as much as 25 gallons if she was doing a lot of cooking. “We drank a lot of store-bought drinks.” Bottled water wasn’t a thing back then; you couldn’t walk into a store and buy Poland Spring or Fiji or Deer Park off the shelves.

It wasn’t entirely clear where the contamination came from, Martin said, because different homes got different results depending on where they were located in Pine Lake Park, which was surrounded by polluting sites.

“We were the center of the doughnut,” she said.

There was Lakehurst Naval Air Station about 2 miles to the west, Peele wrote, where it’s estimated that “millions of gallons of aviation fuel, solvents and other chemicals were simply dumped in open ditches there and allowed to permeate into the ground.”

“On the other side of the neighborhood stood an asphalt plant that ran day and night, using millions of gallons of oil to make road tar,” Peele wrote. “To the east, the 1,400-acre compound of the Ciba-Geigy Chemical Corp., one of the worst polluters in world history, was neatly hidden behind gates staffed by armed guards.”

Not far away was the Legler landfill in Jackson, which was closed due to chemical contamination, and the township landfill, where people had dumped anything in the years before environmental and groundwater concerns were given any attention.

The chemicals that seeped into their wells included the carcinogens benzene and trichloroethylene, among others.

Peele wrote there were a number of women who suffered miscarriages and stillbirths, and babies born with physical deformities, which raised questions.

Martin said she nearly lost her third child in 1985 because of a benign tumor that was growing in her uterus while she was pregnant. It was discovered when she started bleeding three months into the pregnancy.

It wasn’t just mothers who were suffering, however, she said.

“We had a lot of people in Manchester with medical issues,” she said, both adults and children. Her daughter, who’s now 41, had so many medical issues as a teenager that at one point she connected with Erin Brockovich, who became famous for her involvement in helping build a case in California that tied health problems to groundwater contamination, Martin said. One of her sons had health issues as well.

But proving the well contamination was to blame was an uphill battle that was never fought in Manchester.

The focus, Martin said, was getting water mains run in Pine Lake Park, which ended up being financed through the New Jersey Spill Compensation Fund.

Change of government

The fight to get water lines run in Pine Lake Park and persistent questions about how Manchester officials were spending the town’s tax money spurred the community to act.

Within two years, the Pine Lake Park Association for a Better Community formed to fight for the water lines and for help in paying for them. That group later became a key part of Stop Tax Oppression Promptly, which included members from the retirement communities and the non-retirement neighborhoods as well.

Martin said members of the group would go door-to-door, particularly in the retirement communities, which she said were paying taxes and receiving very little in the way of services.

The grassroots group started filling the court room at Manchester Township Town Hall, and demanding the township committee meetings be moved to accommodate everyone. It took a court fight to accomplish that, Martin said.

But the group also made its goal to change the township’s form of government, to get new people involved in town governance and to oust Portash in particular.

Marianne Borthwick and Martin were among a group who worked to build support for the change of government. At the time, Manchester had a township committee that would elect the mayor from within its members. The township also had partisan elections, Martin said.

Portash, whose wife, Adelaide, took over as mayor when he was convicted in the 1970s bribery scandal, had appointed him as the township’s business administrator in 1979, after he was found not guilty during a retrial.

“Portash had control of the Republican Party,” Martin said. “All you had to have was an ‘R’ beside your name and you got elected.”

STOP was a mixture of Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters, and the group’s organizers felt the only way they were going to succeed in changing the government was to take the party affiliations out of it.

They submitted a petition for the change just under the wire to prevent the township from derailing their efforts by creating a committee to study the possible change, Martin said.

Portash was used to getting his way, by all accounts. Peele wrote that other town officials, including Joseph Murray who served as mayor for a few years, would defer to Portash and would follow his directions on everything.

At one point, Portash approached Martin and Borthwick and asked what they wanted, after what Martin said were attempts to intimidate them — including bricks thrown through their windshields and anonymous letters — failed.

“I said, ‘See, Joe, you never met anyone you couldn’t buy off,’ ” Martin said. “We just want people to have what they deserve: clean drinking water.”

At another point, Portash sent a messenger to offer Martin the position as township clerk, saying they would convince the woman who was serving then to retire.

“I said, ‘Go back to Joe and tell him thank you but no thank you. I don’t even know what a municipal clerk does. If I ever decide to become municipal clerk I’ll do it on my own,’ ” she said.

When the outcome approving the government change became apparent during the January 1990 referendum, Portash approached Martin at a polling place.

“I was at the polls because I was a challenger,” she said. “Portash came over to me and said, ‘You may have won the battle, but you have not won the war, make no mistake about it.’ ”

There were no more battles, however; Portash died a month after the referendum of a heart attack while at his vacation home in May. He was 58 years old.

Records in the landfill

Portash’s death unleashed chaos, though it wasn’t revealed right away. A special election was held in May to choose members of the new Township Council and choose a mayor.

Jane Cordo Cameron, who was an attorney, was elected mayor, and the township council members were all part of the STOP slate, including Samuel Fusaro Jr., who recently stepped down because he and his wife moved out of Manchester.

“The nonpartisan governing body opened the door for people like Sam and Carmen Cicalese to run, because they were federal employees” who were barred under the Hatch Act from affiliating with a political party, Martin said.

In the final days of the old administration, members of the Portash administration, including Ralph Rizzolo, who had been mayor; Janice Gawales, who had been the chief financial officer; Beverly Ramsdell, the deputy treasurer; township clerk Manuela Herring and township attorney Siegfried Steele, among others, scrambled to cover their tracks.

When Manchester Township police officers saw township employees loading up boxes of records and dumping them in the landfill on June 29, 1990, everything unraveled.

In addition to pulling sludge-covered documents from the landfill, Martin said filing cabinets were recovered from Rizzolo’s home and documents were from beneath the dog run at Gawales’ home, among others.

Martin said the estimates of how much was stolen from Manchester range from $10 million to more than $20 million, but it was impossible to determine accurately because it was unclear how long the theft — directed by Portash, who benefited the most — had been going on as the documentation from years earlier was spotty.

Some of the theft was blatant, with payees on the check stubs not matching the payee actually written on the checks; in other cases, it was more difficult to sort out, according to news reports at the time.

The new council had to scramble to put together a budget and figure out how they were going to meet the payroll. Martin said there were accounts that had less than $5 in them when the new administration took over.

“Jane Cordo Cameron thought we were exaggerating,” Martin said. “Then when she walked in and realized what was going on, she was taken aback.”

The town’s residents came to the rescue as much as they could, lining up to pay their quarterly taxes early even without having their tax bills. Manchester also received assistance in the form of a $1.5 million loan from the state — which also stepped in to oversee Manchester's finances.

In the end, authorities estimated Portash had stolen more than $2 million for himself, most of which funded a serious gambling habit he had in Atlantic City and Las Vegas. The timing of his death set off conspiracy theories that he had faked his death and was living on an island, but authorities confirmed Portash had indeed died.

For Martin, the fight to get clean water led to a career in public service.

She was appointed to the Planning Board and served there for six years, four of those as vice chair of the board, before going to work in the township’s building office in 1996 as a technical assistant to the construction official.

While working in the building department Martin took a number of courses, including one on zoning, and became a certified fire official and got certified by the state Department of Community Affairs to teach the classes. She went on earn her certified public manager certification through Fairleigh Dickinson University, and her registrar certification. She took all the courses and passed the registered municipal clerk exam — a 5- to 6-hour test — on the first try.

In 2001 she was hired by then-clerk Marie Pellecchia as the deputy clerk, which surprised her because she had no experience in the clerk’s office. Pellecchia told Martin it was her planning board experience along with her organizational skills that impressed her.

“When you said you loved land use, I knew I wanted to hire you,” Martin recalled Pellecchia saying.

'Absolute power corrupts absolutely'

Martin was appointed township clerk on June 1, 2008, the irony of which is not lost on her given her refusal to take the job when Portash offered it.

“I said I would do it on my own if I wanted it, and I did,” she said with a chuckle.

During her time in the clerk’s office, Martin said she kept a copy of the article listing the indictments of the various Portash officials who took money pinned up on her desk, as a reminder to everyone of what can happen if people are not paying attention to what their government is doing.

She also reminded everyone, from mayors to council members to township staff, of the importance of understanding they are there to serve the public.

“You can’t be a public official if you don’t understand the responsibility,” Martin said. “These people (the residents of Manchester) work their whole lives and they’re giving you their money to invest and use to make the town and their lives better.”

“You’re in a position where you have that trust, and you can’t just take advantage of that trust,” she said.

Portash drew people in and took advantage of them because “he was an extremely charismatic man,” Martin said. “You definitely knew his presence in the room.”

In the immediate aftermath of his death, before the corruption was revealed, Portash’s administration named Colonial Drive in his honor, and ordered a massive granite stone and a plaque to honor the man who had been in power for so many years.

“One of the first things the new government did was change the name back to Colonial Drive,” Martin said.

And the plaque praising Portash was replaced with one “Dedicated to the residents of Manchester, past, present and future. Lest We Forget. ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ ”

Martin, whose Pine Lake Park home was one of the last to receive public water in late 1989, said she sometimes marvels at the chain of events that brought Portash down. “Had the state not passed the (well testing) law, who knows?”

“In the absence of real leadership, people will follow anyone,” Martin said. “People don’t understand that it’s a slow process that occurs. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Have a comment, a question or a news tip? Email karen.wall@patch.com