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A 200,000 square-foot Bass Pro Shops store is planned to open in 2015 on land where National Lead Industries used to manufacture paint pigments. The store will sit next to the southern part of the Garden State Parkway's Driscoll Bridge.

(O'Neill Properties Group)

Outdoors megastore Bass Pro Shops, regarded as a mecca among fishing, hunting and camping enthusiasts, has become the first retailer to announce its tenancy in a 1.2 million square-foot mall planned for the 453-acre brownfield adjacent to the Garden State Parkway’s Driscoll Bridge in Sayreville.

The mall will be part of Luxury Point, which the developers have described as a $2 billion project that eventually will have 2,000 apartments and townhomes, office space, hotels, restaurants and two marinas along the Raritan River waterfront. For the past two years O’Neill Properties Group, a King of Prussia, Pa.-based land developer that specializes in building on brownfields, has been excavating and removing contaminated soil from the site where National Lead Industries manufactured paint pigments from 1935 to 1982.

Sayreville Economic and Redevelopment Agency, a group charged with overseeing cleanup and development of contaminated land in the borough, took ownership of the site in 2005, then sold it to O’Neill for $82.75 million.

“As they’re now moving through to the end of the remediation process, we have been testing the materials they pull out of the ground to make sure they got all the way down to the non-contaminated section,” SERA executive director Joseph Ambrosio said.

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SERA has approved O’Neill’s master concept for the land, but O’Neill will have to go before the Sayreville Planning Board before the firm can start construction this fall.

If New Jersey has a mild fall and winter, he plans to build roadways and start on some buildings before the end of the year.

Brian O’Neill Jr., Luxury Point project manager for O’Neill Properties Group, said his firm has remediated and developed more than 100 brownfields between Washington and Boston. The firm cleaned contaminated land in Cherry Hill and later built 330,000 square-foot Woodcrest Corporate Center, which it sold in 2006 for $70 million.

Bass Pro has been slated to open in 2015. It hopes to attract some of the 400,000 drivers who cross the Driscoll Bridge each day.

It took an unprecendented agreement with the state Department of Environmental Protection to cover the $40 million cleanup cost for the site. Tax revenue generated by Luxury Point will be used to repay a $20 million grant from the Hazardous Discharge Site Remediation Fund over four years. The deal also allows O’Neill to recoup 75 percent of its own $20 million investment, but not until the state has been repaid.

“It’ll produce well over $20 million a year in tax revenue, so financially it’s very significant to the borough,” said Sayreville Mayor Kennedy O’Brien. “Our municipal budget is $54 million a year. This will help tax base stabilization to a great degree and enable a lot of people in Sayreville to work where they live.”

Reached last night, state Department of Environmental Protection spokesman Larry Ragonese said the agency has been working with Sayreville and O’Neill to remediate it the land.

“The goal is to get this type of wasteland back into productive use, and back on the taxrolls in New Jersey,” he said. “It’s taking an area that has been lost for some generations, cleaning it up environmentally and bringing it back to the living.”

Editor's Note: The Brian O'Neill interviewed for this article was Brian O'Neill Jr., project manager of the Luxury Point project in Sayreville. A source incorrectly told The Star-Ledger that National Lead and O'Neill Properties Group contributed $10 million each to a site remediation fund. O'Neill alone provided $20 million in private funds to match a state grant.

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