>> From NJ PBS studios, this is NJ Spotlight News with Brianna Vannozzi.

>> Hello, and thanks for joining us tonight.

I'm Joanna Gaggis.

Tonight, we're taking a look back at some of the stories and interviews I've brought to you over the years that have stayed with me.

This is just a very small selection of the countless stories I've had the privilege to tell during my time here at NJ Spotlight News.

They include a look at issues impacting communities across the state, from a Native American community in Greenwood besieged by toxic pollution, to concerns over a suspected cancer cluster in Colonia, raised after residents started asking why so many were dying from rare brain cancers.

There's also my conversation with a female hockey player inspiring young girls to pick up a stick and skates, and my interview with famed New Jersey Native director Kevin Smith on his love for making movies right here in the state.

We'll take a look at those conversations next.

Major funding for NJ Spotlight News is provided in part by NJM Insurance Group, serving the insurance needs of residents and businesses for more than 100 years.

The Ringwood Mines Superfund site in Passaic County sits on the land of the Ramapahlinapi Indian Nation.

It was contaminated with toxic pollutants like lead, arsenic, and cadmium, toxins that the tribe says have contributed to the deaths of hundreds of clan members.

A health study conducted by NYU Langone in September of 2025 found the contamination continued even after the Environmental Protection Agency said the area was clean and safe.

with Klan members and th clean.

It's not clean eno the people for researcher of the Ramapola Nappy Tur near this Ringwood superf like deja vu all over aga being told by the EPA tha site of extreme contamin is all clear, even though by researchers and NYU La that it's not as the EPA up stakes after 42 years, is complete, proclaiming exposure under control.

T school has found that the bodies of the residents h it, you have to go back.

ringwood iron mines in the in the 19 sixties and sev company used the abandoned toxic sludge and used car parts, causing extreme l that led the EPA to deem in 1983.

It then proclaim later.

It seemed appalling of the material that had of it was still there, ri never even touch.

And yet The EPA claimed that it w was okay for us to go bac lives as we always had.

A death sentence.

We have to be 1100 plus people th to less than 200 acting C Lenape Nation.

Vincent Man have been erased since th site in the nineties, dyi all forms of cancer as a exposure.

There are a lot of people who are res The EPA being one of them people.

Ford Motor Corpor people.

The EPA put ringw the Superfund list in 200 complaints from residents waterways and removed mil of contamination from the earlier this year, resear EPA has deemed the site h exposure.

But NYU toxicol been testing the region a last 13 years say their m proves otherwise.

In many levels of lead, of arseni lead in the soil at rates higher than the rest of R wood.

We also found arseni about tenfold higher than a statement.

The EPA told complete all cleanup acti that groundwater cleanup designed and the vegetati surface waters still need They've also not yet been from NYU, but once it's r it and determine whether further actions are necessary.

Tim Eustice of the North Jersey District Water Supply Commission worries that capping isn't enough to protect the Wanaque Reservoir, which supplies water to nearly 3 million people in North Jersey from toxic 1,4-dioxide contamination.

Early on when they made the decision to I guess cap and test, we had had our engineers respond and say that that was not acceptable.

We would prefer a cleanup.

And in response we have designed and funded an emergency cleanup device that if there is a spill, we would be able to detect it miles from here and clean it before it would ever reach the reservoir.

He worries that no remediation will be enough to protect the lives of the tribe members who live here.

In Ringwood, I'm Joanna Gaggis, and J Spotlight News.

In 2022, concerns over a suspected cancer cluster in Colonia were raised after more than 100 community members were found to have rare forms of brain cancer.

New Jersey's Department of Health dismissing the cancer cluster claim, one parent took it upon herself to test for toxins around Colonia High School.

Here's that story and what she found.

I felt forced to take this matter into my own hands to protect my kids.

Edita Komarek is a parent of two high school students who attended Colonia High School up until last week.

The school's been a source of speculation after former resident Al Lupiano began tracking more than 130 rare cases of brain tumors in graduates of Colonia.

with the lack of response recently ran her own test in and around the school.

parent orientation night of August, I was able to, and I grabbed a sample of for PCBs poly chlorinated came back positive.

Um so back and collected a samp samples revealed PCBs and and environmental scient pleading with the state D Protection to continue te testing by the township o and around the school fou the most likely cause of the brain tumors.

Lupiano said radon should have been the start of the testing.

For us to discover 2,300 times the levels that are considered safe in this school, that's troubling.

And she discovered not only PCBs, but we discovered banned pesticides in the soil.

These pesticides, heptachlor, chloridane, they're absolutely linked to various cancers.

And that's why the U.S.

government banned them from being used back in the '80s.

- Komorek's findings come from two separate licensed labs.

She shared her findings with Woodbridge Superintendent Joseph Massimino, who sent a letter to the community stating he would work with the township's environmental consultant to develop a comprehensive plan of action that will provide a framework for the testing.

This plan will be submitted to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection for review, discussion and approval before any testing is done.

Mayor John McCormick said he'll support the superintendent, but pushed back on the notion that these findings have anything to do with any suspected cancer cluster.

Absolutely no connection between these two issues whatsoever?

Everybody said, all the experts said, including the man who brought this to us, said that ionizing radiation is the main cause of brain cancer.

And the only thing you have to test for is ionizing radiation.

Well, we tested for ionizing radiation.

We found none.

We found none of the soil.

An exhaustive 28 acre test of every square inch of the ground.

We had radon detectors in every room inside the school and nothing was found.

Case closed.

Is this a moving target because I remember early on it seemed that ionizing radiation was the answer.

That was the thing and when that came back negative, the feeling now is it could be other harmful chemicals.

We as environmental scientists look at the most likely culprit.

We decided let's start with the for radiation and a tell of radiation is radon.

Bu that there was going to b on here just based on the different maladies that w sure that it may be one o to synergistic effects.

C once again calling on th already.

They should have and groundwater samples f um building material samp Commissioner Lotteria bac was not allowed to ask qu stated very clearly that of any cancer causing ha further investigation.

Ob community an apology and of the township's additio said in a statement they information.

The outcome be made available as soon spotlight news.

I'm Joanna New Jersey is once again emerging as a filmmaking destination, and few filmmakers are more closely tied to the state than Kevin Smith.

I had a chance to speak with Smith about the industry today and his efforts to keep people going to the movies with his local theater, Smondcastle Cinemas in Atlantic Highlands.

Here's a part of that conversation.

Kevin, great to have you on.

You became a New Jersey icon and really a household name with some of the movies.

You made your first movies in the 90s, movies I grew up with, Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, the Jay and Silent Bob movies.

These bring me back to high school.

[laughing] Shouldn't age myself.

What are you up to these days?

I am, you know, trying to keep relevant.

That's the thing I had no idea.

I wish I'd have known before I started my journey into entertainment, which began, oh, 33 years ago, when we started making Clerks in 1993.

But I wish I'd known then, 'cause I would've told young Kev, "If you get what you want here, if somebody buys this movie, anybody, you know, if they acknowledge you're a filmmaker like you seem to think you are, just know that what follows it is a chase for relevancy for the rest of your life.

You have to figure out how to make total strangers care about you enough to invest themselves in your work or whatever it is that you do, so that you don't have to go working at the convenience store again.

So it's like that's-- - Yeah, how much has that chase been fun for you or been pressure for you?

What a great question now If the chase was horrible like I do it because I'm lazy by nature But you don't notice it so much because you're doing the thing you love and whether you're getting paid multi-millions or even like four, five figures, six figures.

You're getting paid to like make pretend.

So you're breathing that rarefied air.

So for most of my career, like I didn't notice that it's only later as relevancy slips away, the older I get, I've been doing this 32 years.

So, you know, whether you like my stuff or not, it's like, well, he has been around for a red hot minute.

And that works in your favor sometimes, but it also works against you.

Sometimes you become the establishment.

I started my career as like, you know, outside the establishment.

So, you know, later in life, it's about how do I make them care about me now?

And you know, so it's a bit more of a struggle now than it was when I was younger, but the sweetest struggle.

Excellent point, which is just like, what else would I do?

It's two things I always say to myself whenever I do something, whether it works or doesn't work.

Number one is, um, you wanted this.

Oh my God, you wanted this.

You changed the entire shape of the universe to make this thing happen.

So don't be disappointed with the results.

You got what you wanted.

Enjoy it.

And then the other thing I always say is what was the alternative?

Like what would you have done if you didn't pursue this, whether it worked or not?

Like to live with it in your head and heart and knowing that you could have done it and could have accomplished it, but you didn't even try?

Like what was the alternative?

I had to do the thing.

- Well, you say you're trying to make people care.

You're at a point right now where you're trying to make people care in a different way.

You opened Smodcast Cinemas in Atlantic Highlands at a time when movie theaters are struggling to get people in their seats.

So bring us to your current challenge of trying to get people to care about going to the movie theater.

How do you do that?

How do you get them in the seat?

My friend, childhood friend, lifelong friend, Ernie O'Donnell, reached out to me post-pandemic and said, "They're closing Atlantic.

That's our movie theater."

You know, it was called, when we were kids, it was the Atlantic, and then it became the Atlantic Islands Twin Cinema.

And then they added three more screens.

It's a multiplex, but a Frankensteinian multiplex.

Most multiplexes you build a big cement block and it's got a bunch of theaters, big parking lot.

This was just a single screen house that slowly expanded over decades into a multi-screen multiplex and whatnot.

So when, you know, this is the movie theater that I went to as a kid.

This was my temple, you know what I'm saying?

Like I've said many times, I never learned anything about myself sitting in a classroom, and I damn skippy didn't learn anything about myself sitting in a church.

Most I ever learned about who I am, I learned sitting in the darkness of that very movie theater, looking up at the great white mirror and seeing, like, life reflected back.

So, the idea of letting it die was anathema.

Like, oh no, we can't let this happen.

And so me and Ernie and our friends got together like the Goonies and saved the theater but it was the worst financial decision I ever made in my life.

Oh my God there was a reason this theater was going under.

Like you don't need a multiplex anymore let alone one there.

They got theaters not too far away with better seats.

I'm here to find out.

I was hoping you could tell me for heaven's sakes.

We've been doing this five years and we had to go nonprofit because the theater will never make a profit for heaven's sakes.

So what we do that's different at Smallcastle Cinemas is I show up once, twice a month, and then we do fun programming.

So like, you know, for, we did a, we do the stop start screening.

So we'll show Mallrats and we'll show the opening scene.

Then we, cause I own the movie theater, we can pause it.

And then we get up and tell every damn story I can remember about the making of just that one scene.

So it's gratifying work keeping the theater alive, but it's hard work, man.

There are theaters with more modern seats within driving distance of our theater.

We have like one of the best projection systems in New Jersey and stuff, but our seats are the same seats that I sat in when I went to see Friday the 13th Part II.

That's how old the theater is.

When we shot my movie... Let me jump in here.

Sure, go ahead.

Let me jump in because I want to ask you about the industry as a whole because we see New Jersey... A lot of people think of Hollywood, right, as the kind of the epicenter of the film industry, but at a time it was New Jersey.

And at a time, again, perhaps it is New Jersey.

We've got Lionsgate, we've got Paramount has a studio, 1888, we've got Netflix that just bought, recently bought Fort Monmouth.

How do you see the industry changing to make it perhaps easier for talent on this side of the coast to create movies, to be in movies?

What do you see and what decisions should filmmakers be considering when they decide where they want to make their movies?

New Jersey becoming the epicenter of film again is gratifying for a longtime Jersey resident who knows that the industry began in New Jersey.

Thomas Edison, one of the inventors of motion pictures, had the Black Mariah studio.

They used to make film in New Jersey all the time.

So it left for a long time.

At one point, they're running away from unions and whatnot.

And then also because the weather out west is really nice.

But in a world where you know, the dollar rains, they're going to go anyplace movie industry is going to go anyplace where they can get a rebate.

And truth is, Jersey has the fattest, sweetest rebate right now.

So as long as that rebate maintains, you know, Jersey will continue to see all the film activity that Atlanta has enjoyed for the last 10 years when they had their big rebate.

And once that rebate kind of went away or the rebates started getting bigger elsewhere, like overseas, we lose a lot of productions overseas.

It'll dry up.

Right now, Jersey's committed, man.

For, I think they put in for 10 years at least of these rebates.

So nobody can take it away.

And that means something.

That's why one of the reasons Netflix is like, all right, we'll buy Fort Mommoth and build our soundstages here.

The only thing that's confounding to me is at least it's Netflix and Netflix is one of the studios that continues to make content as they call it now today, all the time.

And Netflix has all the money.

But building soundstages is just anathema to me.

I'm out here in Los Angeles, in the heart of Hollywood, where most of the soundstages are completely empty right now.

And that's not just because we don't have the tax rebate that Jersey has, but a lot of movies don't need to film on soundstages anymore.

New Jersey never had a shortage of talent, right?

We've seen so much talent come out of New Jersey, but maybe now they have a place more local where they can exhibit that talent.

I've just a little bit of time left that we have.

How do you see yourself as a supporter of the film industry, big picture, Netflix, you know, streaming and trying to keep local movie theaters alive?

Yours in particular, but I'm sure others as well.

Can those two exist at the same time?

Absolutely.

Netflix at this point is in competition for us.

It's a public utility.

You know what I'm saying?

It took the place of normal television, which that was replaced by cable TV.

So it's the standard by which most of us get our information, Netflix, and of course, YouTube and whatnot.

You can't compete with those the same way movie theaters couldn't compete with the golden age of television, when it started drawing people away and stuff.

So you learn to live with it.

And as long as you put some love and attention into a movie theater, you know, I found my path by which I can help, which is like, "Hey, remember Jane Zahnbaub?

We're showing those movies.

Come out and I'll tell you about them."

That's how I can keep that theater alive and keep the dream alive and keep live exhibition going and stuff.

Because watching a movie theater, you know, watching a movie in the theater with a bunch of strangers as the lights go down having that collective experience will never go away.

It's just going to get pricier is really all it comes down to.

Not at Smodcastle Cinemas though where you can see a brand new movie for $12 every night.

There you go, we are not paid to pay for that advertisement.

But you're right, there's nothing like sitting in a theater with a bunch of strangers who you don't know and sharing that experience together.

We have to leave it there.

Kevin Smith, director, writer, actor, and of course, owner of Smodcastle Cinemas.

Thank you so much for being with us.

Great to talk to you.

Thanks for having me.

She's a fierce forward on the ice.

Off the ice, she's an avid ambassador for young girls looking to play hockey.

Her name is Elle Hartje, and she plays for the Professional Women's Hockey League on the New York Sirens team, which plays their games at the Prudential Center in Newark.

I had the privilege of speaking with Harchie about her passion for hockey and inspiring the next generation of female players.

Elle, so great to have you with us.

Thanks so much for coming in.

Wasn't too far from where you practice, right?

Easy commute for me.

For sure.

It's walk and commute.

We love that in New Jersey.

We're going to get into how you got into hockey in just a minute.

But first, I want to ask you, what does it feel like to be the first female ambassador for the nonprofit Hockey in New Jersey?

- I mean, I'm so excited that it was finally announced.

It's been something that's been in the works kind of all year.

My first year for the Sirens was last year.

And going into the off season, I knew I just wanted to get more involved in the community.

And I had met the higher ups at Hockey New Jersey.

And I knew that that was sort of what I wanted to throw all of my weight behind.

So, I'm happy that it's finally official and announced.

And thank you for having me.

What is Hockey in New Jersey and why is an organization like that important?

It's a non-profit organization that runs out of the New Jersey area.

They have rinks and kids from all over, but they are focused on making hockey accessible for people of all backgrounds.

So free coaching, free ice time, free gear.

It's really just making hockey more accessible because it is historically such an expensive sport, and they recognize how much hockey can give back to a kid.

And I just think their mission is amazing.

- And of course, we're living in a time where if you get into youth sports and if you take it seriously, you have to put in the time, be on the club teams, be on the travel teams.

A lot of folks can't afford that.

Yes, I think there's always been a barrier to entry when it comes to hockey.

And I was lucky enough that my family could support me in my dreams.

But there are so many kids who couldn't.

I mean, a pair of skates nowadays can go for $1,000.

A stick is $200.

So all of those things really add up.

Ice time, because you're not able to just go to a court outside or go to the park.

You need that accessibility to ice.

It all really adds up.

You said your family has supported you.

I want to understand how you first got into this sport and when you knew it was going to be a real thing for you.

I got into the sport before I really even knew what I was doing.

My dad was a professional hockey player and I have three siblings.

So all four of us started on skates from basically the minute that we could walk.

And it's sort of been a love story ever since.

I have always been obsessed with the game.

So I really owe it all to my family and my parents for supporting me throughout the years and driving me to God knows where.

Yeah, a lot of travel with hockey.

I've seen you say that you thought you'd be a goalie, but your dad had other plans.

How did that play out?

Yes, I think that when you're a kid, there's something really romantic about being a goalie and stopping the puck and being that person in that.

And my dad, you know, supported me in that, but I think he slowly phased me out before I really realized what was happening.

He would start giving me less and less games because he's always been my coach and he decided what games I was going to be a goalie and what games I was going to play out.

And so before I knew it, I was like, huh, I've only played a couple of games this year.

And then that was sort of that.

But I'm glad he made that decision for me.

But he pushed you to be a forward.

Yes.

He was always in the mindset that you should know how to play all positions.

So, I did play D for a bit.

I had played center, wing, everything.

And I think that that has really translated to the pro level.

It's important to understand all aspects of the game.

But at the end of the day, he did end up having me be a center, which is funny because he had all of my siblings be D. So he orchestrated all of this for you.

Yes, he did.

He's the puppet master.

Seems like he did a pretty good job.

You have been with the New York Sirens, who I might add, practice right here in New Jersey.

Yes.

Not the first team to play here, but take New York's name.

And play, yeah.

We'll let that go.

But what's it been like playing in the professional women's hockey league, playing for the Sirens?

Amazing.

Short answer.

Long answer.

Since I started playing when I was two, there wasn't really anything to look up to besides the Olympics.

There was no pro league that was sustainable to living your life.

I think there were some other leagues over the years where you would have to have another job.

So it really is unbelievable that I'm sitting here with you now and able to call this my career.

And it's my only career.

It's what I do in the offseason.

I train.

I work out, practice, make sure that I'm doing everything I can to come back ready.

And I think we owe that all to the girls and women who came before us.

And really, we're pioneers for this.

And I think that's why it's so important for me to do what I can to give back and get more girls involved and really carry this momentum forward.

Off the ice, you like to have a little fun with fashion.

We got to point out your sparkly jeans here.

They're so fabulous.

Fashion's fun, too, huh?

Yes, I love the walk-ins.

I don't know if you've seen those.

But I just love to experiment with fashion especially because on the ice, you know, there's not as much time to express yourself.

For sure.

Well, thank you for coming here expressing your love for hockey, sharing it with others.

Elle Hartje, great to talk to you.

Great to talk to you, too.

That's going to do it for us tonight.

I'm Joanna Gaggis for the entire team here at NJ Spotlight News.

Thanks for being with us.

We'll see you right back here tomorrow.

RWJBarnabas Health.

Learn more at RWJBH.org.

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