There’s an old saying that a camel is a horse designed by committee — and sometimes a camel is indeed the end result of a public/private brownfield partnership with too many players.

But for well-run collaborations between the public and private sectors, the final project can be well worth the inevitable challenges that come with these multi-faceted developments.

“Having a public cheerleader is critically important to the success of any brownfield deal,” says Todd Davis, chief executive officer of Hemisphere Development in Bedford, Ohio, a private brownfield redeveloper. “It can make a huge difference in a developer’s success or failure. Knowing there’s community support for the project really helps attract end users and create positive public relations.”

Laura Bray

“It takes a lot of time, but the payoff [for public/private partnerships] is amazing,” agrees Laura Bray, executive director of Menomonee Valley Partners Inc. in Milwaukee, which promotes redevelopment of the four-mile-long valley that was formerly home to the city’s stockyards and other major industry. “We actually had a real estate agreement that had nine parties sign on to it—negotiating it has been a challenge. . . . But when we have challenges, people come back to the fact that we’re trying to create jobs and make the area more sustainable. It takes commitment from the top down, with [everyone] saying this is an important project, let’s figure out how to make it go.”

The ABCs of brownfields
Educating both public and private partners about how brownfield remediation works is often the first task of a successful partnership, say veterans. For everyone from community groups to municipal agencies to private contractors, the word “brownfield” may conjure up visions of never-ending cleanup work and lawsuits.

At the acclaimed Menomonee Valley project near Milwaukee, in the beginning when the developers told prospective business owners that "they could be here" (the Menomonee Valley), a lot of people were incredulous. What they had to look at on the brownfield site was not pretty.

“The biggest challenge is educating all of the parties about issues facing a site, and letting them know there are solutions that can be incorporated into a redevelopment,” says Bill Smith, president and principal hydrogeologist for Hockessin, Del.-based Environmental Alliance, a brownfield consultant that helped redevelop a Christina River site in Wilmington, Del., for a new children’s museum. “Meetings are most productive for this, explaining the science on contaminants, the human health risks associated with specific contaminants, and how we handle it through various remediation techniques.”

Stephen Dyment, project manager for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Superfund Remediation and Technology Innovation, says his technical group employs innovative sampling designs whenever possible to increase the amount of contamination data available to project partners. “We try to increase the data density so that all stakeholders have a higher degree of information to make informed decisions,” he says. “Increasing that density puts regulators, developers, insurers at ease.”

Bray says that sometimes, however, the physical look of a site can be so off-putting that potential partners are skeptical any amount of remediation will work.

“In the beginning, when we said your business could be here [the Menomonee Valley], a lot of people said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’” she says. “What they had to look at [on the brownfield site] was not pretty. Even without knowing the details of the contamination, the physical look of it was hard to envision.”

So early on, Bray explains, her group worked with the city and others to conduct an area-wide groundwater study to determine the extent of the contamination. “We asked property owners to test groundwater throughout the valley, and that produced empirical data that said the contamination is not as bad as we think,” she says. “Rather than go site by site, we took an area-wide approach . . . to try to de-mystify the issues.”

The Menomonee Valley group received seed money from the state that it still uses for a pre-development funding pool, she says. “We will purchase the property, do Phase 1 and 2 and analysis on the environmental side, and also look at the maximum economic viability for the site.”

By doing this type of work upfront, Bray says, the group can tell developers, “We’re saving you time and money and taking away some of the risk, free of charge. We’re willing to give you all this information as you do your due diligence.”

William Lynott

Having detailed remediation information from the start can also help allay the public’s fears about potential brownfield redevelopment problems, says William Lynott, founding principal and chief executive officer of Viridian Partners, based in Highland Ranch, Colo. “Brownfield developers are perceived by the community as not being different from your conventional developer,” he says. “Even though it [brownfield redevelopment] is a ‘green’ thing, they’re very concerned about how we accomplish that. We don’t get a hall pass from the community just because we’re good guys.”

It’s also important to show your appreciation to the community as the project unfolds, he adds. Viridian recently worked with Burlington, N.J., and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection on a 130-acre brownfield property that had been the site of a chemical plant for many years, and when the remediation work was finished, they threw a party.

“We had a community get-together on the site—erected tents, had catering bring in lunch—and we thanked our neighbors for being patient with the repositioning of the site,” says Lynott.

In Ohio, Hemisphere Development spent an entire year "working through the politics" with three different municipalities involved in its Lakeview Bluffs development planned for 1,000 acres along the Lake Erie shoreline east of Cleveland.

Making friends
Another common obstacle to merging public and private brownfield interests is the natural mistrust that various parties may have for one another, such as regulatory agencies and private property owners. In northwest Oregon, for example, Clackamas County officials found that owners were hesitant to even sell their brownfield sites for redevelopment because of “fear and mistrust,” says Renate Mengelberg, business and economic development manager for the Clackamas County Business & Economic Development Team in Oregon City. “There was fear of the unknown, the costs that might be associated with it, of getting involved in a program that might pull them into the DEQ [Department of Environmental Quality] web.”

Mengelberg used some of the county’s EPA site investigation funds to provide free, confidential technical assistance to property owners who were interested in selling. “The property owners really appreciate a one-on-one contact who’s knowledgeable and able to communicate to them in layman’s terms about brownfields,” she says. “[A consultant] meets with the property owner at their site to look at it and review any environmental documents they might have about the site. [The consultant] talks to them about what their next steps might be, what that looks like in terms of time and process and dollars.”

“Sometimes you need a personal touch,” adds Gil Wilstar, brownfield coordinator for the Oregon DEQ in Portland. “Someone who is not themselves part of the regulatory structure but knows the regulations, and can convince property owners that it’s in their best interests to work with a [regulatory agency].”

In Ohio, Hemisphere Development spent an entire year “working through the politics” with three different municipalities involved in its Lakeview Bluffs development planned for 1,000 acres along the Lake Erie shoreline east of Cleveland, says Davis. “Historically, they didn’t get along with one another because of economic development issues,” he says. “First we met separately [with each community]. Everybody was in the same county, so then we had the county commissioner spearhead the discussions [with the three communities together]. It was a logical organizing group, since they all had to work with the county. It’s a [strategy] that can be replicated in different environments—finding the common link among stakeholders and trying to use that entity as the organizing force.”

Prepping everyone beforehand was also a key tactic for a brownfield pilot project in suburban Chicago in the late 1990s. Dave Bennett, who today is executive director of the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus in Chicago, worked with the West Central Municipal Conference in 1995 to set up a brownfields “Rapid Response Team” as a pilot for the EPA Brownfields Program. They assembled a group of experts with expertise in finance, banking, engineering and legal work, in addition to state and federal regulators, to provide guidance to both private and public players in regional brownfield redevelopment projects.

“Getting various experts to sit in the room with the regulators there was rather interesting,” he remembers. “The lawyers and engineers kind of looked at the federal and state government as Big Brothers. We had to work through that and change the mindset so everyone was working for the same common goal—to clean up some properties and get them back on the tax rolls.

“Before we brought in property owners or developers [to meet with the Rapid Response Team], we had a few meetings where we had discussions about what the roles would be on the team, how we would like to see them collaborate. There was some discussion about the changing roles of state and federal regulators—how they were really there to help and not to find property owners to fine!” Bennett laughs.

Staying on track
Combining different public and private bureaucracies in a brownfield partnership can also boost the odds of getting bogged down in details and competing opinions, with the group losing focus as the months and years go by. Keeping everyone organized and on topic is often an inevitable challenge, says Ernesto Vasquez, vice president and partner at MVE & Partners in Oakland, Calif., an architecture and planning firm that designed the 14-acre Uptown Oakland Development zone.

“The tremendous amount of lead time for these projects is challenging—you need tremendous cultivation,” says Vasquez.

The Uptown project, a transit-oriented development on the site of former under-utilized parking lots, “had a lot of history, with many alternatives explored for the site,” says Vasquez. “The city took six to seven years to do the planning and entitlement, and through those phases, a couple of other ideas came about,” including a high-tech campus and a baseball park, before city officials went back to their original concept of a mixed-use residential development.

“Given the long history, the local city council district office played a key role in keeping people informed [about the project],” he says. “There was a newsletter and Web site to keep the community at large informed about the process.

“The city manager was also instrumental in keeping the various elements of the city working in concert. A lot of times with this [multi-year] planning process, people get lost in the shuffle of the vision. Communication really helped us leverage the opportunity to do something sophisticated and fairly unique for the city of Oakland.”

Frequent communication has been essential to the success of a Washington state pilot cleanup project that teams the state Department of Ecology with Shell Oil Products, says Bradly Gilmore, a hydrogeologist with the Voluntary Cleanup Program in the department’s northwest regional office in Bellevue. The two partners signed a voluntary agreement in November 2008 under which Shell is cleaning up contamination at 86 former and current gas station sites in northwest Washington, with completion expected by 2019.

“There is a lot of interaction back and forth, more so in this program than in a traditional [voluntary cleanup] program,” says Gilmore. “One of the goals of the project is to foster more open and more frequent communication between both parties, establishing that communication and trust.”

And with funding from the U.S. EPA, the Department of Ecology is also posting site-by-site updates on a Web site dedicated to the project (http://www.ecy.wa.gov/PROGRAMS/tcp/sites/vcp_sites/vcpOverview.htm)

Sometimes, though, even the best-organized team just can’t get a brownfield vision to the next level. In Waukegan, Ill., a plan to redevelop the city’s lakefront brownfields that was created by a commission of public and private members has been stalled for several years because of problems putting it into action.

“Everybody could get on board to come up with a plan . . . and the plan was excellent and has won some awards,” says commission member Tom Muscarello, an associate professor at the College of Computing and Digital Media at DePaul University in Chicago. “But the major downside is that it’s still [just] a plan.”

Muscarello attributes the lack of action in part to the economic downturn, but also says the large, complicated brownfield area requires extensive coordination among private and public sources for funding, cleaning up contaminated land, consolidating land parcels, and obtaining government approvals.

Earlier this year, however, the EPA approved up to $25 million in stimulus funding for the Outboard Marine Corp. Superfund site on Waukegan Harbor, which is contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). And the lakefront area has seen “lots of predevelopment activities,” according to Robin Schabes, director of lakefront and downtown redevelopment for the city of Waukegan, including a preliminary city engineering study.

Breaking up a project into smaller pieces, on the other hand, can help public and private partners pull together as a team over the long haul. In Canton, Ill., the site of a former International Harvester plant that produced agricultural equipment is getting a new lease on life in a series of gradual cleanups.

“We worked with the city on our site remediation program,” says Doug Scott, director of the Illinois EPA in Springfield. “We did it in a way so that we didn’t try to tackle the whole site at once, but with a series of cleanups and engineering barriers, so we could get portions of the whole site ready at different times. Then they could work, in turn, with the private sector to bring in some businesses.

“That kind of creativity makes sense,” he adds, “and it wouldn’t have worked without government and private developers doing their part. Where many brownfield projects work best is where the public sector has been creative in acquiring properties and doing a lot of environmental work ahead of time.”