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- 1. Brownfields –Opportunity for Redevelopment Texas Association of Regional Councils South Padre Island, TX September 16, 2009
- 5. A winning grant identifies sensitive populations environmental justice issues
- 6. A winning grant provides health statistics * to show potential impacts of brownfields *National Air Toxics Assessment
- 7. A winning grant estimates the numbers of potential brownfield sites
- 8. A winning grant provides economic statistics
- 11. A winning grant has a plan for community involvement
- 12. A winning grant describes the economic benefits to your community
- 13. A winning grant describes non-economic benefits
- 17. A thorough site inventory provides the basis for site assessments 1=no, 2=yes DEEDHLDR Current Property Occupant CONTRACTTO LEGAL Adj. to Corridor MCGOO BUTTON CO MCGOO BUTTON CO INC LOTS 1 THRU 5 BLK 2 1 CORPORATION A A COMPANY LOTS 1 & 2 & W 20' LOT 3 BLK 29 1 BRYANT ROOFING CO LOTS 6 TO 8 BLK 25 2 FIRST NATIONAL BANK ARNOLD MOTOR SUPPLY BLK 16 EX W 10 LT 1 SWLY 15 LT 1 BLK 15 & VACATED BOND ST S MUSC 2
- 19. Phase II ESAs clear properties or confirm contamination
- 20. Cleanup planning is based on the future use of the property
- 21. Progress is reported quarterly to EPA
- 22. Community involvement is ongoing
- 23. Use your brownfields grant to leverage other funding sources EPA Brownfields Assessment Grant Federal, State, Local Grants Private Investment Appropriations Municipal Bonds TIF and Special Assessment Districts User Fees
- 27. State programs for funding and in-kind assistance AZ CO FL IL IA NM TX Grants X X X X Liability Protection X X X X X X X Loans X X X X Loan Guarantee X Technical Assistance X X X X X X X Tax Incentives X X X X X X
Notas del editor
- The intent of this webinar is to share with you the steps in the EPA brownfields grant process and what the end result can demonstrate for your communities. There’s sometimes some confusion about what a brownfield property is. According to EPA “A brownfield is a property, the expansion, redevelopment, or reuse of which may be complicated by the presence or potential presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant.” We like to simplify that and say that a brownfield property is any property that you want to redevelop but have been unable to for whatever reason.
- In the mid 1990s when the program was still a pilot almost everyone was a winner. President Bush signed the Small Business Liability Relief and Brownfields Revitalization Act into law in 2001 which authorizes up to $250M per year for EPA Brownfields. Since that time the program has grown in popularity and become more competitive. Although authorized for up to $250M, Congress usually only funds it for between $55 and $75 million. This past year an extra $100 million in ARRA was added to the program, so of the 450 applicants a little over $300 were funded. Next year there won’t be the additional stimulus funding but Congress is expected to fund the program at a higher level than the past. There are 2 ways to apply for EPA Brownfields Assessment. A local government can apply for up to $400,000, $200,000 for hazardous substances and $200,000 for petroleum contamination. Or a coalition of 3 or more eligible entities, local governments or COGS, can apply for up to $1,000,000 for hazardous substance and petroleum.
- We’ll be talking about what it takes to write an EPA Brownfields assessment grant application. There are several types of EPA brownfields grants but an assessment grant is the foundation of the process. These pointers on writing a winning grant application also apply to the other types of EPA Brownfields grants. I’ll also be talking about how to implement the grant once you’ve won. There be some discussion on using your EPA brownfields win to leverage other financial assistance for redevelopment projects. And lastly…some case studies that demonstrate SUCCESS.
- Of course the beginning of the EPA brownfields project is writing a grant that can blow the others out of the race. First of all you’ll need to show that your community has a need. You’ll want to select a “target area” that has a disadvantaged sector of the population that could be impacted by the brownfields. You’ll want to show that you have a Vision and you have already been actively pursuing that Vision. There will need to be plan to involve the community in your Vision. You’ll want to show that it’s a shared Vision. Most importantly, your winning grant application will show that there will be concrete and measurable benefits from the grant funding.
- First we’ll talk about demonstrating community need. Well take Alamo Area Council of Governments as an example. What you see here are a few population segments that EPA considers sensitive populations: Children, Senior Citizens, Minorities, and persons who use a language other than English at home. Other examples might be pregnant women, persons with disabilities, homeless etc. When brownfields properties are located in the midst of what EPA considers to be sensitive populations then we have what EPA considers to be environmental justice issues. You never see the City dump or the even a new manufacturing facility located where it would impact upper middle class society. It’s normally located near those with the least political influence. Or conversely, those with the least means and influence migrate toward areas where the property values have been lowered such as brownfields areas. From the information we have presented here, AACOG might consider talking about the impact of Brownfields on children and it’s Latino population which is a larger percentage country. The percentages of elderly are lower than state and national averages.
- After your target area has been identified, you’ll want to show that there is the potential for the health of the persons in or near the target area to be adversely impacted. You can get statistics from the National Institute of Health, the CDC, local health department, etc. What I’ve shown here are statistics from the National Air Toxics Assessment for health risks in Bell County, Texas. You can see that for cancer risk the median persons/million with cancer is higher than the state at large. Bell looks pretty good for respiratory hazards and mortality. Just an aside. In your grant application, you’ll always want to cite your sources. EPA will not consider statistics to be valid if you don’t identify the source.
- EPA wants to know how many brownfields sites you have in your target area. This chart is for the Middle Rio Grande Development Council. A good estimate can be gotten by looking at properties that are on the EPA radar through permits or other reporting. These can be gotten from the EPA websites ENVIROFACTS. There’s also an EPA website call EJ Mapper (Environmental Justice Mapper). That’s a good website to use if your target area is smaller. It can identify demographics and regulated sites in relatively small areas. For Middle Rio Grande, they might want to target hazardous substance in Val Verde and Maverick Counties, or petroleum in Val Verde and Uvalde Counties. If you want to talk about the potential for petroleum contamination you can get the number of USTs from TCEQ. Information on mines can be obtained from the US Department of Labor Mining Health and Safety Administration (MSHA).
- Another mechanism you’ll want to use to show your need of the grant funding is economic information on your target area. Using the East Texas, you could show a large percentage of persons living below the poverty level. You have a lower percentage of renters (more homeowners) than country so you probably wouldn’t spend a lot of time on that. What you could cite is the large percentage of vacant homes compared to the state and country and also the high unemployment rate compared to the state. You may not feel comfortable highlighting what appear to be negative aspects of your community but communities that show need get the funding. Again, cite your sources. I got this information from the U.S. Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics.
- Next EPA wants to hear about your vision of the future. Describe to them what you are going to do with that old gas station site, train depot, closed manufacturing facility, the community impacted by mining runoff, that oil exploration waste pit or that drycleaners.
- Talk about the green space you have in your comprehensive plan. The new conference center, inner City park, or trails. Talk about the green energy and jobs you have planned and the new business parks that are on their way. Cite your own comprehensive plan or other planning documents you have that express your vision. Most importantly, tell EPA what you are already doing to make this happen. Tell EPA about your communities that are Main Street communities. Tell them about the contaminated gas stations you are working with NMED to clean up. Tell them about other funding sources you are using for redevelopment including any private investment that has been made due to the efforts you are making in your communities. Private investment can include actual dollars, but it can also include in-kind support, i.e. volunteer hours.
- A winning grant application always has a comprehensive plan for maintaining two-way communication with the public. You should describe how you will keep the public informed about progress on your project. Equally as important is describing how you will solicit feedback from the public and what you will do with the comments once you receive them. Commonly used for public involvement are local TV and radio stations, public meetings, brochures, brownfields page on the City or County or EDD website. Public involvement is usually more successful when you have a citizen advisory panel that includes various interests and demographics in the community. Comments received from the public should be always be reviewed and evaluated. One thing you’ll want to sure to reinforce in your community involvement is that EPA Brownfields is a VOLUNTARY program. No property owner is going to be forced to participate. You can describe the benefits to them: Clearing their property of the perception of contamination. 2) Making their property more attractive to potential buyers. Using EPA funds to pay for something (the Phase I ESA) that either they or the buyer would otherwise have to pay for. Increasing property values in the area.
- EPA wants to know the economic benefits you’ll receive because of you brownfields grant. What I have here are some of the common ones: increased investment and tourism. Increase property values through beautification. New jobs with better wages.
- EPA also wants to know about the non-economic benefits. Those normally include things like, new City parks, better community health through walkable, bikeable communities, reduction of blight and reuse of infrastructure. Lastly I’d like to emphasize that for your grant application you need to discuss the “cold hard facts” of existence in your Target Area. We have a joke in our office that the application needs to make EPA cry. When we’re finished writing we pass them around to our teammates for review and see if we can see tears in their eyes. You want to move the reviewers emotionally. Two years ago we wrote an application for a very nice midwestern city that had a recreational river running through its target area. It also had a large homeless population living in that area. I contacted DNR and got information on contaminants in the river including fecal coliforms from runoff. I contacted the local Mental Health Agency and got their estimates of the homeless in that area currently living under bridges. Well we sent the application to the City for review and they said “oh my goodness” we can’t talk about fecal coliforms in the river or homeless people. What would people think? So they had us take that out of their application. Needless to say they didn’t get funded. EPA probably read their application and said “oh what a nice community.”
- You’ve WON! Now what? These are the items you’ll need to take on as a grantee. Develop a Work Plan, Sign the Cooperative Agreement and Retain a Qualified Consultant. Your Consultant should be able to do any of the remaining tasks, even if you chose to take them on yourself.
- Prior to getting your funds, EPA will ask for a Work Plan. That simply means putting your application into a format that’s useable to EPA for measuring your progress. It will ask for how you’ve budgeted for Environmental Site Assessments, Community Involvement, etc. It will also want to know how many ESAs you plan to have completed and when. When do you plan on holding your community meetings? All of this should be in your application and it’s just a matter of transferring it to the appropriate government form and putting a schedule to it. Ask your EPA Project Officer for a template, it will ease this process.
- Once EPA approves your Work Plan and you’ve completed and signed your Cooperative Agreement , you’ll need to retain a Qualified Environmental Consultant following Federal Contracting Guidelines for a qualifications-based selection. The Consultant you retain should be capable of performing every task you have in your Work Plan so you don’t need to worry about it. Even if you want to do some of the tasks yourself, your Consultant needs to have the experience to know what those tasks entail (are eligible for reimbursement) so none of your funding is jeopardized. If this is your first brownfields project, a consultant with experience can help you over some of the hurdles. The types of professions that are helpful on your consultant team are engineers, environmental scientist such as geologists of biologists, and planners.
- The first thing your Consultant will help you to do, if you don’t have one completed already, is to use your priorities to develop an inventory of the brownfields sites in your target area and rank them according to importance to your redevelopment plans as well as the potential for contamination. You’ll review and adjust the site inventory and prioritization and then submit the sites to EPA to make sure they are each eligible to have federal Brownfield funds spent on them. EPA doesn’t want to spend brownfields funds on sites that are already being addressed in another program such as Superfund, RCRA or the state underground storage tank program.
- Once EPA has approved your list of sites, your Consultant will prepare access agreements for you to send out on your letterhead requesting access to the properties you’d like to do Phase I ESAs on. The Phase I ESA is non-intrusive. It involves a search of records to determine the history of the site. The records search will look at old City Directorys, Fire Insurance Maps, aerial photos, etc to identify potential problems such as underground storage tanks, previous uses of hazardous substances, etc. A site reconnaissance will identify any current environmental conditions that could be a problem. Site personnel and local government officials such as the fire departmetn will be interviewed to see what they know about the site before compiling all the information into a report. A Phase I ESA either clears the property, says we don’t see any problems here, or recommends a Phase II ESA.
- The Phase II ESA is the stage where soil and/or groundwater samples are collected. There are 4 possible results of a Phase II ESA. Didn’t find any contamination in the samples collected. Found some contamination but it’s below regulatory limits so it’s not a problem. Found contamination that will need to be addressed through regulatory channels. More investigation is needed. Most of the results I’ve seen in brownfields investigations have been either 1 or 2. We didn’t find anything, or it was contamination but was at insignificant levels and didn’t preclude redevelopment.
- If contamination is identified, your Consultant will use the State voluntary cleanup program to develop a cleanup plan that will address the contamination and keep the regulators happy. EPA has two brownfields grant programs that can be used to cleanup contamination that is identified. An EPA Brownfields Cleanup grant or an EPA Brownfields Revolving Loan Fund grant. You will not be able to clean up the contamination with this assessment grant.
- Your agreement with EPA will require that you submit quarterly progress reports to them. Your Consultant should be able to prepare these for you. Each quarter you well tell EPA how much of your budget you have expended and on what. You will also list the milestones completed that quarter. Timely progress reporting is important because if you apply to EPA for additional funding, they will look at how you managed the requirements of this grant. So you’ll want the Quarterly reports in on time and you’ll want to show progress on each report.
- One community involvement event per year is what I’ve normally seen done. You can also use other community events for brownfields outreach. Having a booth or table at another forum. Passing out brochures whenever you can. Be sure to listen to feedback from the public. Public comments should help guide the direction of the redevelopment. I was involved in a brownfields assessment of a property one time that had a 100-year manufacturing history. We’d completed the Phase I ESA and were preparing for the Phase II ESA—the drilling and sampling. We heard by chance from talking to a local community member that had worked there in years past that there were buried drums containing chemicals on the north end of the property. This was crucial information that we hadn’t learned through any other channel. I’m just glad we knew about where they were before we started drilling. As a result of the conversation we had a GPR survey (ground penetrating radar) to determine that there were buried objects that we’d known nothing about.
- Your EPA Brownfields grant can be seed money to secure additional funding for redevelopment through other state and federal grant programs, the private sector, federal appropriations. You can also if you choose continue to fund your redevelopment through special assessment and TIF districts as well as user fees.
- There are many opportunities for funding transportation projects in conjunction with brownfields. These are some of the types of transportation programs that offer funding. We are currently doing a brownfields project with a municipality that has received state DOT funds as well as federal stimulus money to do a highway improvement project right through its brownfields area. We’ve suggested that the City use it’s brownfields funding to do environmental site assessments on the properties that will be included in the highway right-of-way. That way they can use all of the transportation funds for the highway rather than using them to do the environmental site assessments that will be required.
- Were you aware that the USACE can do Phase I ESAs on properties that are in floodplains using PAS funds? This is another way to use your brownfields funding as leverage. Several of the HUD and EPA programs can provide complimentary funding assistance to your brownfields initiative. I’ll talk about ways this has been done when we get to the case studies.
- Some other economic development sources of funding are federal transit grants the USDA rural infrastructure loans and grants and of course EPA.
- States often provide brownfields funding grants and loans through the state department of economic development, DOT, the state finance authority and the state natural resources department. Many states also provide tax incentives for redevelopment of brownfields properties. State funding opportunities tend to be less stringent with the restrictions and provide great occasions to leverage federal funds. In New Mexico NMED offers free technical assistance, funding for the Voluntary Remediation Program, Targeted Brownfields Assessment services, Brownfields Revolving Loan Fund Program. A Targeted Brownfields Assessment is where the state will come out and do the environmental assessment themselves. This is often used for smaller communities when they have just one problem site.
- Again, what type of funding is used on the project is highly directed by the project and tend to be unique to every redevelopment situation.
- This is a site we worked on for several years. It was initially in an EPA Brownfields Pilot project before President authorized EPA Brownfields as a Program. It was the former location of a manufacturer of concrete truck barrels. Approximately 7 acres, the site was contaminated with heavy metals, semi-volatiles and volatile organics (solvents and such) in the groundwater. A funny story about this site. They had a couple of buried rail cars that they had been using to store fuel oil. Well they realized they had a hole in one of the tanks when their fuel oil started disappearing. So instead of storing fuel oil, they started storing their spent solvents in it.
- Here’s an aerial view. This site was in a low income residential neighborhood. (You have your environmental justice issues there). It had been fenced but the fencing had huge holes. There were transient people living there. Evidence of illegal activities was found on the site. The fire department had responded to two arson fires in the last few years.
- The City completed the Phase I and II, and III ESAs with EPA Brownfields funding. After seeing the results of the environmental investigations, the property owner donated the site to the City. The City then applied for and received a grant from the Iowa Department of Economic Development to do the demolition of the buildings. Neighborhood planning funds were received from USACE and an EPA Environment Justice Grant was used for additional community outreach.
- The site was enrolled in Iowa’s voluntary cleanup program and EPA awarded the City an EPA Brownfields Cleanup grant to removed the buried rail cars and do the remaining cleanup. As of spring 2008 it is shovel ready with institutional controls in place. (define institutional controls)
- Here’s an example of private brownfields redevelopment triggered by a City’s use of EPA Brownfields funding. This is a former meatpacking plant, also located in Iowa. The City where it was located had been involved in EPA Brownfields since the mid to late 1990s and done a lot of redevelopment work on the Mississippi Riverfront. As a result, other developers were moving in a purchasing brownfields properties. This site had several problems. An old waste lagoon full of biosolids, and contamination from heavy metals and organic contaminants located along the railroad sidings.
- I worked with the private developer to get the site enrolled in the voluntary cleanup program. We went to the City to request that it apply for BEDI funding to address storm drainage problems around the site. The City agreed. Private funding was used to demolish the structures and cleanup the site. Because it was in the VCP, the state regulators allowed the use of site-specific industrial standards for the cleanup so the cost was lower than it would have been otherwise. I don’t have a current photo, this one is after the demolition, but I understand it is now the location of a large box store who’s truck you see parked out front.
- This is a historic theater located in a small community in Georgia. It was built in the early 1900s and used as a theatre until the mid 1960s at which time is was converted into retail use. It had been standing vacant since 1996. The City applied for an EPA Brownfields Assessment grant to determine the potential for contamination. What was found, besides a lot of bat guano and dead pigeons, was lead paint and asbestos that needed to be addressed.
- The owner donated the theatre to the downtown redevelopment authority who applied for an EPA Brownfields Cleanup grant to address the lead paint and asbestos. This is the theatre as it is from the outside today. The Development Authority is continuing to raise funds to complete the rehab of the interior.
- HUD Hope IV grant combined with other committed funds from lenders and community groups. Private developers also contributed funding. Current investment total is $113M. PHX has info on its website regarding some key stats. Phoenix also allocated funds. It is a combination public, tax credit and market housing development effort. The idea is to create a seed development that attracts more development Stanley did the planning, community meetings and cost estimating.
- Upon opening in 1941, the Matthew Henson Projects were the first public housing units in Arizona available for rent to the city's African American residents. The property was named after Matthew Henson, the African American explorer, who co-discovered the North Pole. The housing units were constructed with all of the modern conveniences of the era and were a model for other public housing units west of the Mississippi. The original red brick units maintained a courtyard design which encouraged the sense of community that still exists at the property today. The projects epitomized the, "It Takes A Village" concept while neighbors often watched their children play during visits with other residents. This close-knit community nurtured and developed some of Arizona's most notable community activists, politicians and school teachers.