Newark climate activists watching their neighborhoods lose as state actors play mitigation
This [two-part] series was produced as part of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University’s 2025 NJ News Commons Investigative Reporting Initiative, and supported with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
On the corner of Frelinghuysen Avenue in Newark’s South Ward, the skeletal frame of what will become the Lionsgate Film and TV Studio rises from the dirt where the Seth Boyden public housing complex once stood. Construction crews work behind chain-link fencing while, across the street, residents of the Dayton Street neighborhood watch the transformation of their block from porches and apartment windows. The studio is the crown jewel of a massive redevelopment wave sweeping this corridor—but for the people who live here, the ground being broken carries as much uncertainty as promise.
New Jersey’s environmental justice law—signed in 2020 and considered one of the most stringent in the nation—requires the state’s Department of Environmental Protection to evaluate the environmental and public health impacts of certain polluting facilities in overburdened communities before issuing permits. In January 2026, a New Jersey appellate court affirmed the legality of the rules implementing the law, rejecting industry challenges.
But as the Lionsgate project progresses, environmental advocacy groups are increasingly concerned that state regulators are failing to conduct the necessary oversight to ensure that the community is protected from environmental harm.
Eight-nine requests for state review have been initiated statewide since the EJ law was adopted in 2023 – and so far the state has issued only one decision. The Lionsgate project remains under review even as the construction continues. Community organizers say the state’s pace is so slow that city officials, community organizers, and residents are struggling to find ways to build in some accountability measures themselves.
Amy Goldsmith, New Jersey State Director of Clean Water Action, whose organization, has been writing comments and attending briefings with the DEP on a variety of matters, including the upcoming budget negotiations and priorities as well as permit approvals for a variety of projects, said the process so far has produced little accountability.
“I don’t want to call them a joke, but they’re kind of a joke,” Goldsmith said.
A representative from the state’s Department of Environmental Protection Larry Hajna said that the agency’s oversight has not been affected by the Trump administration’s sweeping federal environmental cuts. In fact, the DEP’s Office of Environmental Justice and its Advisory Council are fully operational, according to Hajna.
He also said that though advocates like Goldsmith and even a researcher at Rutgers claim that there are dozens of permit applications with only one decision, the claim is an inaccurate characterization of DEP’s process.
According to Hajna, “there is a difference between applications for projects that DEP received before the EJ Rules were formally adopted in April 2023 and applications received after April 2023. To account for the gap between the EJ Law being signed in Sep 2020 and the Rules being adopted in Apr 2023, previous DEP Commissioner Shawn LaTourette signed Administrative Order 2021-2025 to meet the spirit of the EJ Law while the rules were being finalized.”
He went on to say that one decision was issued under the AO but many others “received no public comments and were closed out. Some others had public comments that DEP translated into conditions that were included in the applicant’s permit.” Where advocates are getting the count of 89 is a result of “an outdated process.” According to the DEP there are 12 pending permit applications “subject to the EJ Rules.”
The DEP did not comment on why advocates had differing information on its procedures or the length of the process.
Goldsmith noted that the new interim DEP leadership, under the administration of Governor Mikie Sherrill, briefed a select group from the environmental community roughly a month ago, naming environmental justice, Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), also known as man-made "forever chemicals,” contamination, and flooding as the Department of Environmental Protection’s top three priorities—but offered no specifics on what that would mean in practice. It remains unclear whether the new Sherrill administration will speed up the cumbersome process and prioritize thorough and comprehensive evaluations.
Some of the state reviews that have been completed have been cursory and have failed to address community concerns, Goldsmith said. She pointed to the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission’s gas-fired power plant in Newark as a case in point: Elected officials, community groups, and residents all opposed the project, and the state “ gave the permits anyway” in July 2024.
City officials, environmental and community groups say that this points to the need for better communication and coordination between state and local officials. Nicole Hewitt-Cabral, the Chief Sustainability Officer for the City of Newark, was candid about those concerns.
“We don’t have strong contacts at the state level,” Hewitt-Cabral said. “We haven’t really had conversations with the incoming or the new administration, or even too much with the old administration.”
For the chief sustainability officer of New Jersey’s largest city—where nearly every census block qualifies as an overburdened community—the absence is striking. “My desire, my dream, my vision, my wish, is that Newark and the Office of Sustainability is a part of every conversation,” she said.
What Happens When No One Is Watching
Goldsmith said the erosion of federal environmental oversight does not just affect grant funding. It removes institutional checks that once gave communities leverage.
In July 2025, multiple federal agencies revoked longstanding regulations implementing the National Environmental Policy Act, eliminating all requirements to consider environmental justice and cumulative impacts during federal environmental reviews. With those protections weakened, and with the state maintaining that municipalities play no formal role in environmental justice compliance, the burden falls on volunteer organizers and underfunded community groups—the same organizations that have just lost their federal grants.
That dynamic is playing out over the Lionsgate Film and TV Studio, being built in the Dayton Street neighborhood where 90 percent of residents live in public housing. The project is part of a broader development wave that includes an Amtrak extension, the closure of the local Dayton Street School, and plans for an Anheuser Busch data center. "When you begin to change the community now, you're pushing people out," Kim Gaddy of the South Ward Environmental Alliance explained — the same organization that lost two and a half years of remaining federal environmental justice funding when its grants were terminated.
Before the city finalized any agreement with the developers, Willie Jetti — a district leader and founder of the Dayton Community Action Partnership — spent five months drafting a 47-page community benefits proposal. Jetti, who is now running for the South Ward seat on Newark's City Council, said the document detailed protections against gentrification, provisions for a grocery store in what he described as a food desert, and inclusion requirements for the residents of the impact zone. He submitted the proposal to the South Ward councilman at the time, and copies were shared with Gaddy and other local organization leaders.
The community benefits agreement that was ultimately signed on December 11, 2025, bore little resemblance to Jetti's proposal. The final document was just a few pages long, executed exclusively by the City of Newark, the Newark Housing Authority, NJ Media Production Stages, and Great Point Newark Studio. No community organization — and no resident of the Dayton Street neighborhood — was a signatory.
Tim Lizura, Executive Vice President of Real Estate and Capital Projects at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, which helped facilitate the agreement, said that Great Point, the performing arts center, and city representatives from the mayor's office and council met with community members on several occasions over the multi-year period leading up to the agreement's execution. He also noted that Great Point did not take state incentives or a city property tax abatement and was therefore not required by statute to enter into a community benefits agreement.
But community leaders dispute that the engagement was meaningful. Jetti said his organization was completely excluded from the final agreement, and that the $200,000 in nonprofit funding was split among organizations that had no connection to the Dayton Street neighborhood or its residents. "There's no way a community is not even mentioned in community benefits," he said. "I don't know how that works, but I know it doesn't work like that." He is now considering legal action, alleging that portions of his original proposal were incorporated into the final agreement without acknowledgment or compensation.
The agreement commits the developers to using "commercially reasonable efforts" to employ minority workers at 25 percent of construction jobs and city residents at 40 percent, and during operations, to hire minority workers and city residents at 70 percent of on-site jobs. It includes $200,000 for ten local nonprofits, $100,000 for the South Ward Environmental Alliance's green jobs programming, at least 15 annual community events, and solar panel installation.
"A community benefits agreement is an agreement with a community. And none of us actually received a copy before they signed it," Gaddy lamented.
Alliance leaders learned they were slated to receive $100,000 only when their name was called from the podium at the ribbon-cutting. "Engagement of community should be before you sign it," she argued.
No federal agency and no state agency was involved in the agreement's negotiation or is responsible for monitoring its implementation. The Lionsgate studio, as a film production facility, does not fall under the categories that trigger environmental justice review under New Jersey's law — meaning neither the Department of Environmental Protection nor any federal agency is required to evaluate the project's impact on the surrounding overburdened community. The South Ward Environmental Alliance is named in the agreement as a partner for green jobs training and environmental reporting during construction — but the organization is doing that work with fewer resources after losing its federal grants and watching a $350,000 application freeze. Gaddy put it simply: "When you were able to kick certain things into gear, you kind of got to now slow up because of funding."
Hewitt-Cabral was not involved in the community benefits agreement negotiations. She said she is now working with other city directors to ensure environmental provisions become standard in all future agreements.
Filling the Gap
As local governments grapple with a lack of state oversight, the federal funding cuts are adding to the challenge of carrying out environmental efforts with even more limited funding.
Despite the losses, Hewitt-Cabral’s office has refused to scale back. Under Mayor Ras Baraka, the office has planted 1,051 street trees in less than a year, launched a Cool Roofs initiative hiring technicians to paint the roofs of community buildings white to reduce heat, and announced Gen Green—the first youth-led, sustainability-focused participatory budgeting process in the United States, setting aside $50,000 for young people aged 23 and under to vote on climate proposals.
Hewitt-Cabral said her office had applied for a $20 million federal grant to coordinate climate resilience work across roughly 15 agencies and community organizations. “If we had received that funding, it would have been completely transformative for climate resilience in the city,” she said. The application was terminated in a later round. Additional grants her office had secured—one addressing extreme heat, another from the Department of Energy for clean energy and waste management—were either terminated or frozen.
Community advocates, meanwhile, are building their own infrastructure. The South Ward Environmental Alliance has launched Newark Organized for Accountable Development, training residents in land-use law so they can testify at zoning meetings. “Oftentimes all you see is a big whiteboard that says, ‘proposed project coming,’” explained Christian Rodriguez, a Newark consultant and grant writer. “It doesn’t even say ‘attend community zoning board meeting.’… Often people will see this and they don’t know what the heck that means.”
As part of retroactive negotiations with the Lionsgate developers, the alliance is also demanding electric vehicle charging stations on-site—staffed by the Newark residents the alliance is currently training as certified technicians. “We’re about training folks to place them in meaningful jobs, but also create real green micro-businesses,” Gaddy stated.
“We haven’t had to shift in saying that we are not going to work on environmental justice issues,” Hewitt-Cabral said. “That is one of our ethos.” But the limits of entrepreneurialism are real. Goldsmith noted that the Department of Environmental Protection is proposing a three percent budget increase and plans to bring on additional staff—but she cautioned that the agency has never recovered from former Governor Christine Todd Whitman’s 25 percent workforce cut, losing roughly 1,000 staff positions over the years. “The DEP is probably the worst funded and kind of the most complicated of agencies,” she said, “because it’s doing science and it’s trying to do enforcement and has all these permits.”
“I try not to be discouraged,” Hewitt-Cabral said. “If you’re discouraged, you give up. And I’m not the type of person who’s going to give up.”
The state’s environmental justice law remains on the books, its legality recently affirmed by the courts. But the pace of implementation is slow—and the gap between state regulation and local reality continues to widen, leaving city officials, community organizers, and residents to fill it themselves.
