DEC says no permit was sought before chemicals were introduced into monitoring well at New Rochelle site weeks before a five-year cleanup deadline; matter investigated by state’s environmental crimes unit.
NEW ROCHELLE, NY (June 30, 2026) — The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has revoked the Certificate of Completion for a toxic cleanup at the Family Court Building site in New Rochelle after a worker was seriously injured when chemicals were introduced into an environmental monitoring well, the agency said.
The incident occurred November 4, 2025, at 11 Garden Street / 1 Cottage Place, the site of Westchester County’s Family Court and a 186-unit affordable housing tower.
It is not known whether the incident affected the residential tower at the site, known as West View Apartments, or whether residents were notified. DEC’s account of the incident, provided to Talk of the Sound, does not address impact to the residential building specifically. Talk of the Sound has asked DEC directly whether the residential building or its occupants were affected, tested, or notified, and is awaiting a response.
“On November 4, 2025, the City of New Rochelle notified the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation via DEC’s Spill Hotline that a person hired by an Applicant to the Brownfield Cleanup Program poured sodium persulfate and sodium hydroxide (lye) in a monitoring well at the site that resulted in serious injury to the person performing the work,” a DEC spokesperson said.
Multiple agencies responded to the scene, including DEC’s Environmental Conservation Police Officers, the spokesperson said. The agency’s Bureau of Environmental Crimes Investigators took over the investigation immediately afterward.
DEC confirmed the well involved was identified as MW-4, one of six groundwater monitoring wells installed at the site as part of a state-supervised cleanup that began in 2019.
A Certificate of Completion closes out a state-supervised toxic cleanup and certifies a site is safe for its intended use. It also shields a property’s owners from state liability for the contamination they cleaned up and underpins state tax credits tied to the project, including a 50% credit rate for site preparation and on-site groundwater remediation and a tangible property credit that includes a bonus tied to maintaining the certificate’s status. Losing the certificate puts both protections at risk, exposing owners to potential direct liability for the contamination and opening the door to the state clawing back tax credits already claimed.
Under DEC rules, a certificate may be revoked only on narrow grounds, including a finding that the certificate holder failed to comply with its cleanup agreement, failed to manage the site’s environmental controls as required, or intentionally violated the terms of the environmental easement governing the property. DEC did not say which finding applied in this case.
Under the rules governing the certificate, the holder has 30 days from the date of any revocation notice to cure the violation or request a hearing before the action becomes final. Talk of the Sound has asked DEC for the date the certificate was revoked and whether the certificate holder sought to cure the violation or requested a hearing, and is awaiting a response.
The property, formerly known as the Cottage-Garden Auto Repair site, was contaminated for decades by a plastics manufacturer and an auto repair shop that operated there, leaving the soil and groundwater tainted with chlorinated solvents, heavy metals and other contaminants. The site entered the state’s Brownfield Cleanup Program in 2019.
As part of the approved cleanup, contractors excavated more than 22,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil and, in June 2020, injected nearly six tons of a chemical oxidant — sodium persulfate, sold under the brand name PersulfOx — into the groundwater to break down lingering solvent contamination. That program was approved in advance by DEC and documented in daily field reports filed with the agency.
The cleanup was declared complete in December 2020, when DEC issued a Certificate of Completion, but only conditionally. Under the terms of that certificate, the site’s owners had five years from the date of the certificate, until the end of December 2025, to bring groundwater contamination down to state standards or risk having the certificate downgraded. The November 4 incident occurred roughly seven weeks before that deadline.
State monitoring records show that as of the last publicly available test, in March 2022, contamination levels in one well, identified as MW-3, had rebounded to roughly 17 times the state’s groundwater standard for trichloroethene, a chemical linked to cancer and other health effects.
Any further chemical treatment of the groundwater required prior written approval from DEC under the site’s state-approved Site Management Plan. That plan also required the property’s owners to give the state seven days’ notice before any work involving the monitoring wells.
According to the DEC spokesperson, none of that happened.
“The Applicant did not submit a Corrective Measures Work Plan for this site after the 2020 groundwater remediation program because DEC was not aware of prior activities at the site by the Applicant that required the submission of a CMWP,” the spokesperson said. “The Applicant failed to submit a required work plan to DEC prior to introducing the sodium persulfate and lye to MW-4, in violation of the Site Management Plan.”
As a result, DEC revoked the site’s Certificate of Completion.
Talk of the Sound has filed public records requests with the City of New Rochelle for police and fire department reports related to the incident and any legal action of related communications. This publication has also reached out to the Westchester County District Attorney’s office to ask whether the matter has been referred for criminal prosecution.
Talk of the Sound additionally contacted Mark Fonte, listed in DEC records as the Volunteer Contact for The Mark 95 LLC; Mark Stagg, whose company is listed as a certificate holder for the site; Joseph Simone of Simone Development Companies, which has been involved in the site’s redevelopment; and Fuad Dahan of SESI Consulting Engineers, the engineer of record for the site’s remediation program. None had responded as of this writing.
Editor’s note: Counsel for the site’s ownership has disputed DEC’s account of the November 4, 2025 incident. Read about the response here.
This story will be updated as new information becomes available.
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This article was prepared with the assistance of AI tools under the direction and editing of Robert Cox.
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