BRICK — Each morning, Brick Township resident Sheri Remick wakes up to the smell of asphalt.
She suspects the oily smell—similar to the smell on the clothes of her husband, a former asphalt worker—comes from a Stavola Industries asphalt plant less than half a mile away.
“It’s toxic,” Remick said, “to the animals, and to humans as a whole.”
Remick, alongside her neighbors, expressed concerns about an application for construction on the 70-year-old asphalt plant on Chambers Bridge Road, a project that environmentalists and the Brick Municipal Utilities Authority say will pollute the drinking water that comes from the nearby Manasquan River.
The asphalt plant’s owner, Stavola Industries of Tinton Falls, is seeking approvals for construction permits from the township’s Board of Adjustment to demolish and rebuild about half the plant’s facilities, including what its engineer described to the board as the ‘oven’ where the asphalt is made, in a hearing on Wednesday night, Aug. 5.
The Stavola asphalt plant, just west of the Brick Township Municipal Building on Chambers Bridge Road, is shown Friday afternoon, January 30, 2026. The plant’s owner wants to expand and has a hearing before the Zoning Board Wednesday.
The hearing marked the fourth meeting before the board on the approval for the construction plans. The latest hearing largely featured heated questioning of Stavola’s engineer, Joshua Sewald, who said the goal of the construction is to “change the way we bake the asphalt.”
The improvements are intended to come from moving newer equipment from a plant in Hillsborough Township to the Brick location, Stavola’s attorney John Jackson told the Asbury Park Press. The proposal will result in a “dramatic upgrade to the grounds, including the stormwater management,” he said.
But SBB’s lawyer Michele Donato disagreed with this analysis in her questions at the hearing, which focused on the company’s similar, failed 2006 application to the board. That rejection was upheld by an appeals court at the time, but now the company has returned to the board with an updated application for site improvements.
In response, Jackson said the company this time received a permit from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) that authorizes “demolition of portions of the existing asphalt facility.”
“The board wasn’t comfortable because the DEP and others did not opine on direct issues,” Jackson said, referring to the prior application. He cited materials submitted to the Coastal Area Facility Review Act and other agencies, describing the plans as “improving the environmental use.”
But objectors to the plan place little stock in the DEP’s support, saying the crux of the case relies on the impacts on the township’s drinking water. In a statement to the Asbury Park Press, the Municipal Utilities Authority executive director Chris Theodos said the intake facility that provides drinking water to 100,000 residents is close to the plant, and that the authority “is concerned that any contamination, whether accidental or otherwise, would present a direct and unacceptable threat to public health.”
That threat is what motivates SBB’s executive director Britta Forsberg, who said “it’s been decades that the community’s been at the suffering end of their problems. And now they’re back again, asking to increase the volume of their output.”
The hearing on Stavola’s application could not be concluded, as other cases pushed into a three-hour time limit, prompting the board to suggest a protected time to hear the case, which the board aims to have on October 8th at 7 p.m. and in the Municipal Building, 401 Chambers Bridge Road.
This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Brick asphalt plant issue hears concerns from neighbors
