Counties take an active role
in brownfields development

Once the site of various light industry, the Poinciana Industrial Center is now part of a brownfields assessment project in Dade County, Fla. The county hopes to return the 30-acre site to productivity. It was destroyed in the Liberty City Riots of 1980. Photo by Doug Yoder

When officials in Northampton County, Va. began planning a new eco-industrial park, they found a perfect spot. The site overlooks the Chesapeake Bay and is near a new golf resort community. But there was a problem. More than 150 acres of the site is a brownfield, an abandoned industrial or commercial site where redevelopment is complicated by real or perceived contamination. In this case, the site contained an abandoned city dump and an old rail yard.

The General Accounting Office (GAO) estimates there are between 400,000 to 600,000 brownfields across the country. These sites range from abandoned factories in inner cities to vacant gas stations in rural areas. They may or may not be contaminated, but the fear of an expensive cleanup is enough to chase away many potential developers. And they turn right to undeveloped land in the suburbs, known as "greenfields."

"Businesses locate in undeveloped areas because they don't want to wrestle with the liability issues," said Peter McLaughlin, chair of NACo's Large Urban County Caucus, and commissioner from Hennepin County, Minn. "Counties end up extending the infrastructure to these businesses. You spend the money in the end, where you could have spent the money on brownfields in the beginning. Brownfields get in the way of private investment in areas that are developed, whether they're in urban areas or rural counties. This issue is central to sustainable development."

There is growing momentum to address the problem of brownfields as a way to replace urban sprawl with "infill" development. President Bill Clinton mentioned the issue in his State of the Union address on Feb. 5, and later approved tax incentives for redeveloping brownfield sites that meet certain criteria. The second national brownfields conference, Sept. 3-­5 in Kansas City, Mo., attracted more than 1,700 participants.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors (USCM) calls brownfields a "top priority," and vows to push the issue to the forefront of the national debate.

Brownfields is also on the agenda of NACo's Large Urban County Caucus. The caucus raised the issue in meetings last week with senior administration officials. Caucus members discussed liability issues, innovative clean-up technologies and the need for increased federal funding.

"We need greater federal resources," McLaughlin said. "We're putting state and local funds together, but they don't go far enough. The way the economy works has changed. It's bad for counties to simply walk away from these properties. In many cases they have the utilities there and you can make use of the existing infrastructure."

As national attention builds, several federal efforts are growing as well, including the Brownfields Economic Redevelopment Initiative, which includes the assessment pilot program that helped Northampton County, Va. move ahead with its eco-industrial park. These EPA grants support the development of county-wide brownfields plans, as well as the assessment and remediation of sites.

The Phase I environmental assessment of Northampton's site is done, according to Timothy Hayes, director of sustainable economic development for Northampton County. A Phase II assessment, starting soon, will help the county develop a remediation strategy for the site. The site is slated to become a teleconference center, serving the companies in the park as well as the Town of Cape Charles and the community.

The project, now in its third year, has already attracted a total of more than $1.7 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Interior and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Hayes said that although brownfields are often thought of as an urban problem, counties such as Northampton, population 14,000, have a big role to play.

"Whenever you think about a site that's been formerly used for a productive purpose and is no longer being used and has obstacles to redevelopment, when you use that definition, I'd be surprised if there is a county in America that doesn't have a brownfield site," Hayes said. "I know our county has several."

Taking inventory
In addition to assessment and liability problems, another obstacle many counties and cities face is that they don't have an accurate inventory of brownfields, their contamination or a comprehensive plan for their redevelopment.

The EPA's database of sites has about 30,000 entries. A 1996 survey by the USCM found almost 21,000 sites in 39 cities alone. Both of these figures are a small fraction of the GAO estimate. Some counties that have received assessment grants from the EPA, such as Bucks County, Pa., are using them to catalog brownfields and prioritize them for redevelopment.

Bucks County, with a population of about 600,000, has more than three square miles of brownfields, mostly the sites of former steel mills and other industrial facilities that have closed in the past 20 years, taking with them 10,000 jobs. New businesses are reluctant to locate in the brownfield sites because they fear contamination and the expensive liability that could come with it. Bucks County received a $200,000 EPA assessment grant this spring and is just beginning its project, according to Rob Loughery, enterprise zone coordinator with the Bucks County Redevelopment Authority.

This auto salvage yard in Clearwater, Fla., is one of thousands of brownfields across the country. Federal programs are beginning to address the problem and county governments are playing a role in brownfields redevelopment.
Photo by Mike Roiland / Clearwater, Fla.

"Our biggest problem is that we don't have an accurate inventory of these sites," Loughery said. "We want to have a list. It's important that we can tell people about the site, the problems that exist and ways we can make it work."

Loughery said he expects the inventory to take as long as a year. This inventory will be extensive, done with consideration of the barriers to a site's redevelopment and how to overcome those barriers.

"There's a handful of sites that we're confident we can put on the market," Loughery said. "We know that just a perception of problems has detracted businesses from them. There's a demand for property in this market because of the labor pool and location. We can meet the need with these properties."

Some sites with a high potential for redevelopment will be put on a "fast track" program, in which the county will use some of the EPA funds for assessment and remediation. Loughery said the county hopes to have some brownfields ready by late next spring.

Clean-up standards
Another issue in brownfields redevelopment is risk-based cleanups, which consider the end use of the property, as well as specific qualities of the site, in determining the environmental standards that must be met, according to Doug Yoder, assistant director of the Dade County (Fla.) Environmental Resources Management Department.

For instance, clean-up standards for petroleum contaminants are often based on an assumed risk of groundwater infiltration, Yoder said. Yet, there are circumstances where soil conditions and groundwater location makes contamination unlikely. With no risk present, the environmental standard can be met by the natural degradation of the contaminant without remediation, he pointed out.

Because many brownfield sites are in poor neighborhoods, Yoder said a community outreach program is vital to avoid the appearance that environmental standards are being unequally applied. Florida's brownfields program calls for early involvement of neighborhood groups, as well as public hearings, before a site can be designated a brownfield.

Yoder is a member of the Dade County, Fla. Brownfields Advisory Task Force, assembled in May 1996 to recommend county-wide polices. The task force had been working on the issue for about a year when Dade County became part of the assessment pilot program. Yoder said $100,000 of the EPA grant will go to continue the task force's efforts to develop a county-wide policy. The other $100,000, coupled with $200,000 from a state program, will fund the site assessment and remediation of the Poinciana Industrial Center (PIC), a 30-acre site owned by the county. Once the site of various light industry, it was destroyed in the Liberty City Riots of 1980.

"There have been ongoing efforts to get those sites back into use, but one of the barriers has been the contamination," Yoder said. The county hopes to have the area ready for commercial and light-industrial development in the spring. The site is adjacent to Dade County's oldest housing project and is in an area of high unemployment.

Brownfields redevelopment is a crucial part of Dade County's future, and dovetails into a state program called "Eastward Ho!" which is aimed at stopping development from encroaching on the Everglades. In the next 12 years, Dade County's population is expected to grow by 500,000 to 2.5 million. The region can't accommodate this growth through the traditional pattern of suburbanization, Yoder said.

Recommendations
Dade County's task force is scheduled to make its recommendations next spring. Yoder said some themes are beginning to develop. Certainly the group will address financial incentives, including a revolving loan fund, to help pay for site assessments. Another key area will be streamlining the review process for developers.

The group was also considering a way to limit a developer's liability, perhaps through insurance, but the state's Brownfields Redevelopment Act of 1997 made that a moot point. The state act has a "reopen" clause that holds a developer responsible for cleaning up contamination that wasn't found in the site assessment.

"That's one of the lingering apprehensions that redevelopers have," Yoder said. "If a developer comes in, does an assessment, then starts to remediate and finds something new, the developer has to deal with it."

In the spotlight
In early 1998, the EPA will announce 10 Brownfields Showcase Communities, which will be selected as models of collaborative effort in redevelopment.

"The federal programs are moving in the right direction," McLaughlin said. "They're helpful, but this is a big problem. You end up paralyzed at the local level. In the past we didn't take care of waste and it has become a cloud hanging over a property. We need to remove the cloud from these properties and we need federal resources to do that."

Yoder agreed that the national focus is helpful. "I think the concept of viewing these brownfield areas as having value and being the future of economic development is good for a variety of reasons," Yoder said. "It can help deal with inner city decay and address transportation problems and suburbanization. Still, there are some sites that are simply not going to be redeveloped without significant incentives from somewhere.

"It has always been easier to develop a tomato field in the country than assemble individual parcels in an area," Yoder added. "Unless you can make it more difficult to convert those tomato fields, you won't overcome the differential."