CASE STUDY OVERVIEW After eight years and more than $2 million in investment, the Joyce. A Savocchio Business Park has been dedicated and opened for business. A once blighted eye sore was remediated and now acts as a catalyst for revitalization in a highly impoverished neighborhood. Ultimately, a sense of pride and hope has been restored to this area in the city of Erie, Pa. …
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When I moved here 14 years ago, I was truly alarmed at the prospects for a good quality of life. That is not the case any longer. MAPS is truly a full participation community project because the entire community had to vote to tax themselves to make it happen. …
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Discover. Disclose. Correct. Prevent recurrence. These are the key words in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Audit Policy. The EPA is currently testing a number of tailored incentives that apply to new owners of regulated companies who identify, voluntarily disclose, and promptly correct environmental violations. …
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David Misky, Assistant executive director, Redevelopment Authority for the city of Milwaukee, Wis. With work on more than 100 brownfield redevelopment projects under his belt, David Misky says balancing the interests of everyone involved with a site is both his greatest challenge and his favorite part of the job. (See the Renewal Awards feature story that details the acclaimed and award-winning Menomonee Valley project.) …
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In the Dickensian sense, 2009 was the worst of times, and the best of times for South Carolina. Hit hard by the global recession, the state's unemployment soared to an alarming 12 percent. Nationally, South Carolina became the butt of jokes on late night television comedy shows as Governor Mark Sanford admitted to having an extra-marital relationship with an Argentine reporter. …
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Jason S. Lichtstein, president of the Florida Brownfields Association. Lichtstein is an environmental attorney and shareholder with the Akerman Senterfitt law firm in Tallahassee. He has significant experience in the cleanup, redevelopment, and reuse of Brownfields and other contaminated properties in Florida. Lichtstein's practice includes a range of environmental transactional, environmental regulatory compliance, and state legislative and agency advocacy matters. He was closely involved in the drafting, lobbying, and passage of the 2008 Brownfields legislation in Florida. …
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PROPERTY SIZE: 22-mile transit loop circling Atlanta's urban core. Covers 6,500 acres or 8% of the city's land area. PROJECT TEAM: Atlanta BeltLine, Inc.; Beltline Partnership; Atlanta Development Authority; City of Atlanta; PATH Foundation; Trust for Public Land; MARTA; EPA; EPD …
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LOCATION: Charleston, S.C. SIZE : 141 acres BACKGROUND: Cherokee Investment Partners' project in North Charleston, S.C., known as Macalloy, is an EPA Superfund Site. The former steel plant fronts Shipyard Creek and is situated in an industrial and commercial section of the Charleston Peninsula. The site of the former Macalloy Corp. ferrochromium plant was one of the nation's most polluted industrial areas. Ferrochromium alloy, a hard stainless steel, was manufactured at the site from 1941 to 1998. During operations, the plant produced chromium, arsenic, lead, mercury and zinc contaminates and accumulated more than 6,000 violations of the Clean Water Act over the years. …
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LOCATION: Ocala, Fla. SIZE: 7 acres BACKGROUND: A derelict meat packing facility sat vacant for 10 years before the owner, who also ran a construction business, used the seven acre site for storage of his heavy equipment as well as a staging area for materials. Code violations and fines were piling up from the general neglect of the building, but also for an ammonia freezer system that continued to run without regular inspections. In addition, a huge electric bill had accumulated and went unpaid due to the operation of the freezer. Ultimately, in order to resolve the existing liens and bills, the owner deeded the property to the city of Ocala. …
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ALABAMA The Alabama Dept. of Environmental Management (ADEM) believes strongly in the Brownfields Program and is committed to becoming a national leader in brownfields information and development. The first step towards this goal has been the development of the ADEM GIS Site Inspector, an interactive, multi-faceted web-based technology that allows developers to locate brownfields in Alabama and easily access a wide range of data about the site including former business, potential contaminants, estimated costs, liability waivers and more. …
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Brownfield sites, including closed landfills, sometimes also referred to as legacy landfills, are financial liabilities to their owners whether they be a municipality, a county or the former operators or owners of the site. …
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Development of brownfield sites can help significantly in controlling greenhouse gases and the impact that they have on global warming. Reducing the impacts of greenhouse gases can be accomplished through reducing the amount of gases created or by sequestering the gases once they have been released into the environment. The process of sequestering greenhouse gases may result in carbon offsets. Greenhouse gas technology is anything but "light as air." In fact it can be quite heavy; as a result it's instructive to provide a primer on greenhouse gases before delving into carbon offsets. …
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In logic, they call it a categorical syllogism. Consider this: No geese are felines. Some birds are geese. Clearly, “some birds are not felines” is the unequivocal conclusion of the syllogism. With apologies to logicians everywhere, Brownfield Renewal magazine scared up its own syllogism in early 2009 when we acquired the former Brownfield News & Sustainable Development magazine. …
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Getting requite approvals for brownfield-related initiatives, including transportation-oriented developments (TODs), endures far less resistance when an economy is growing, prospering. In a tough economy, when the rubber hit the road, there's far more mobilization and hard work required by all parties involved. …
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At press time, the 111th Congress was working towards a mid-December adjournment, after grappling with monumental issues—economic crisis and stimulus, energy and climate change, and health care—that left less global issues, such as brownfields, struggling to move off the back burner. From a direct brownfields and sustainable development perspective, little in the way of concrete legislative achievement has been realized so far in this Congress. We saw no brownfield program reauthorization, no permanent brownfield tax incentive passed, and no sustainability initiative enacted. …
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In the consumer marketplace, the hyper-speed pace of technology sets the trends, and the newest, latest version of everything rules. In the world of brownfield remediation, however, technological change is an evolutionary process measured in years and decades rather than microseconds. Even though technologies that can enhance “green” remediation are top of mind for many projects, the widespread use of such tools is still a work in progress, say industry observers. …
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