Becker is thrilled to announce New Jersey Office Managing Shareholder Arnold Calabrese is a recipient of the Legal Services of New Jersey Equal Justice Award Medal. Arnold was celebrated for his extraordinary pro bono contributions along with other recipients at the 2022 Equal Justice Awards Reception, which took place on June 7th. Specifically, Arnold is recognized for his pro bono legal counsel to St. Stephens Church in Newark, NJ. When the church discovered that an area used as a preschool playground on their property was contaminated with lead and arsenic, they hired an environmental consulting group to complete soil testing and remediate the condition. By law, a Site Remediation Professional (LSRP) must sign off on a site to complete the clean-up process and issue a Response Action Outcome (RAO). Unfortunately, the environmental consulting group hired by the Church failed to pay the LSRP and the issue was left unresolved while St. Stephens continued to incur hefty fines for contamination violations from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.
Then, in 2020, Arnold stepped in at the request of Essex-Newark Legal Services. He put together a team of litigators from the Morristown office, including Sarah Klein, Vincenzo Mogavero and David Dockery to assist, and filed a lawsuit against the environmental consulting group for unfinished work. He also leveraged his network to connect the church with a new environmental consultant, Kassidy Klink, PG, LSRP from Peak Environmental – A Nova Group, GBC Company, a driller for test cores, Environmental Probing Investigations, Inc., and a Lab, Aqua Pro-Tech Laboratories, who all agreed to provide their services pro bono to complete the remediation project. In a successful conclusion to the case, Becker secured a default judgment under a consumer fraud count and settled the matter in an amount that made St. Stephens financially whole again.
Arnold is Vice-Chair of the firm’s Community Association Practice Group in New Jersey and a member of the Construction Law & Litigation team. He is highly recognized for his advocacy on behalf of his clients throughout New Jersey, especially in the areas of construction defect and transition litigation (see njconstructiondefectlaw.com), as well as general representation services and debt collection.
About Legal Services of New Jersey
Legal Services of New Jersey (LSNJ) heads the state’s Legal Services system, a network of six independent nonprofit corporations, and has been providing free essential legal aid in civil matters to low-income people through offices in all 21 counties in the state for 55 years. Since its inception, LSNJ has provided representation in more than 2.7 million cases.
For more information about LSNJ, visit: https://www.lsnj.org/index.aspx
For more information about the 2022 Equal Justice Awards Reception, visit: https://www.lsnj.org/EJA/