Foothill Ranch Exec Targeted Over Toxic Waste

He runs a multimillion-dollar Foothill Ranch vitamin company whose products get rave reviews from actors Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris and New York Mets catcher Mike Piazza.

But New Jersey officials are preparing a bitter pill for 88-year-old Jay Patrick: They want to force him to pay for the estimated $2-million cleanup at the site of a chemical company he ran for 25 years in Bergen County where about 1,000 drums of toxic solvents were found buried.

Patrick acknowledges that Tect Inc., the Northvale company where he served as president and chief chemist, buried chemicals. But he says it had no alternative and believes there’s little New Jersey can do about it 32 years later.

“I can’t say I’m proud that we buried those things, but there was nothing else we could do,” Patrick told The Record of Hackensack. “We couldn’t burn it because that would kill people, and we couldn’t bury it up in the mountains. There was no alternative.”

Patrick said he expects his vitamin supplement company, Alacer Corp., to take in about $24 million this year.

That has New Jersey officials hopeful they can recover most or all of the cost of cleaning up the site.

When the contamination was discovered in March, Northvale officials assumed the company’s former owner was long dead. But after Northvale Mayor John Rooney publicized the contamination, a local newspaper received an anonymous letter asserting the owner was living in California.

Rooney said that because the contamination occurred more than 30 years ago, Patrick cannot be prosecuted criminally. And there were no laws in effect at the time prohibiting the burial of solvents on an industrial site.

He said he hopes the borough or state can sue Patrick to recover costs of the cleanup, which the state is paying for out of an account funded by levies on the chemical industry.