In our spotlight on Business Report, the year long fight between a Jersey Shore town that's home to a toxic waste site and the state is far from over.

Toms River joined environmental groups Save Barnegat Bay this week, filing a lawsuit to overturn a recent settlement reached between New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection and the company that polluted the ground and water there for decades.

The damage led to health problems for people living in and around Toms River, including a rise in childhood cancer cases.

As Ted Goldberg reports, critics are calling the settlement a sweetheart deal.

The Sea Bulgogi settlement proposal hasn't gone over well in Toms River.

Now the township is joining Save Barnegat Bay to sue and stop the settlement from happening.

BASF and its predecessor, Ciba, have been exploiting the residents of Toms River in our environment for the last 60 years.

Mayor Mo Hill says the lawsuit challenges the proposal on multiple fronts.

The state gives them 250 acres that they can market as commercial real estate, which we don't think it's fair to the residents, to Toms River.

That land should be deeded to Toms River as open space.

Under a proposal accepted by the DEP, BASF would pay the state $500,000 as part of a natural resources damage settlement.

BASF owns the Sebagai site, which polluted Toms River groundwater for decades.

The environmental organization Save Barnegat Bay alleges the damage is far worse than $500,000 worth.

Estimating the true value to be $1,000,000,000.

They were relying upon, in their own words, a Green Acres valuation that was on a piece of property that we were engaged with in Bretton Woods and Bricktown.

Well, that's a mature wooded parcel, not a former Superfund site.

The value of those two pieces of land are vastly different.

Executive director Britta Forsberg says the settlement proposal violates New Jersey's spill act and accuses the DEP of not giving the public enough time to comment on the proposal.

We were called by the DEP into a private Zoom meeting back in December along with a, you know, an entourage of environmental groups.

And this is when we first learned about the deal.

They had only given 30 days for public comment.

30 days.

Mind you, that started on December 5th through the holiday period of which we complained immediately about, first of all, the law at a required 60 days.

Attorney Albert Telsey represents safe Barnegat Bay, but not Toms River.

He says other parts of the settlement violate the law and render the proposal null and void.

You can't do environmental or energy restoration projects on property where it's against local zoning to do it.

And Toms River has a local zoning ordinance, is to say we don't find that there's any ecological uplift in putting environmental easements on contaminated properties.

Peter Hibbard isn't part of the lawsuit, but he's providing technical assistance to save Barnegat Bay after living in Toms River for more than 40 years.

The reason they came here is the dyes that they were making and dyes have to be stable, so they're hard to get rid of.

But the color of the wastewater match the color of the river, so nobody would notice.

You can see the fence surrounding the Sea Bulgogi site from his home.

His first run in with contaminated water was in the early eighties.

There was mercury, there was cadmium.

There was chromium.

According to EPA data.

Those are three of the chemicals Ceiba guy dumped into the ground.

Hibbard leads Ocean County Citizens for Clean Water and has spoken out against the settlement several times, saying it doesn't cover the extent of the damage caused by sea buggy.

A number of the people who had worked there took me well, showed me on maps where they had dumped barrels and crushed them.

And the EPA was not even interested in looking there because they felt they could pick up the contamination before it left the property.

The DEP tells us they don't comment on ongoing litigation.

A lawsuit that could take a while, leaving folks frustrated in Toms River.

For NJ Spotlight News, I'm Ted Goldberg.