Cities and towns across the United States have considerable incentive to remediate and reuse their brownfields. Besides protecting the environment, communities that succeed at putting contaminated sites back into productive use reduce blight, alleviate urban sprawl, attract new businesses and increase their tax base.

But the undertaking can be costly, and with more than 450,000 brownfields across the U.S., competition for limited federal grant money is fierce. A comprehensive proposal is essential to securing a piece of the $100 million federal pie, and communities are increasingly finding that they can create stronger proposals—and ultimately, better brownfields programs—by leveraging available technology.

The federal government makes several grants available through EPA's Brownfields Program. Among them is EPA's Brownfields Assessment grant, which provides funds for communities to inventory, characterize, assess, plan and coordinate community involvement initiatives related to brownfields redevelopment. To win a grant, applicants must prove, among other things, community and financial need.

Harnessing technology for grants
Creating an accurate inventory of potential redevelopment sites is a prerequisite to demonstrating need, but gathering data about contaminated properties historically has been a labor-intensive task—one that required communities to retrieve and assemble environmental information from multiple sources for each property under consideration.

Communities are increasingly finding, however, that they can streamline the process by using commercially available data to create inventories of sites with current or past environmental issues and then overlay the data with commercially available historical information, such as fire insurance maps, to highlight high-priority areas.

This type of information, which has typically been geocoded (assigned a latitude and longitude for easy mapping), can also be used to complete EPA and state site eligibility forms and screen out ineligible sites or those that may require a property-specific determination from EPA.

"Our goal in Boston is to manage and sell brownfields properties so they can be put back into productive use as soon as possible," says Thomas Barrasso, a Senior Environmental Program Manager with the city of Boston. "Prior to using commercially available environmental data, we had no sense of what was going on with the 1,400 to 1,600 sites in our jurisdiction, because we couldn't afford to have each one individually assessed."

Leveraged experience
Barrasso drew upon his 25 years of experience as an environmental professional to create a pre-screening process for the city that taps into commercially available data sources. He likens the method, which allows his team to "see the big picture quickly" so they can "decide where to spend real cleanup money" to emergency room triage: The worst sites get funding for detailed assessments and cleanup, while the least impacted can be evaluated, managed, and quickly put back into reuse.

Like Boston, the city of San Bernardino, Calif. uses commercially available environmental data in its brownfields program. The city, which has already won two EPA grants—one to assess petroleum contamination and another to assess contamination associated with hazardous substances—is relying on electronic historic fire insurance maps to pinpoint areas of concern within city boundaries.

"Our agency has already located several possible abandoned gas stations from the 1950s that do not appear to have been permitted," says Kathleen Robles, the city's redevelopment project manager/brownfields manager. "We've also been able to identify several historic industrial areas within the city's downtown. We're a staff of two, and I cannot see our brownfields program being successful without the use of [commercially available] environmental data."

Robles says her agency also taps into historical data to add to its GIS-based site inventory database, which the agency developed with the help of an environmental engineering firm. "While there are not enough funds to investigate every site of environmental concern at this time, the agency will have developed a database containing significant historic data for future grant opportunities as well as for future redevelopment strategic planning," she says.

Communities with more than a few brownfields on their hands can save countless hours of research by pre-screening sites using commercially available environmental data. Communities that create detailed, accurate site inventories are better positioned to compete for limited federal funding and are better able to allocate those dollars where they will be the most productive (such as cleaning up high-priority sites).

Dan Welby is the sales director of Environmental Data Resources' Corporate and Government Services Group. Reach him at (800) 352-0050 or dwelby@edrnet.com. Visit EDR at edrnet.com.