Trenton Surges Forward With Redevelopment
The success of Trenton's brownfields efforts has earned the city a second revolving loan grant under EPA's Brownfields Revolving Loan Fund program. The Revolving Loan Fund provides capital funding to municipalities to create loan funds, which provide money to clean up brownfield sites. Due to the success of Trenton's brownfields program over the past several years, the EPA on July 19, 2000 awarded Trenton an additional $500,000 to supplement a previous EPA revolving loan grant for the same amount.
Through its efforts, the City has cleaned up and redeveloped more than 30 brownfields, recycling nearly 100 acres back into productive use. To date, a total of $1.9 million has been awarded by EPA to Trenton in brownfields redevelopment grants, funding for staff support and evolving loan funds.
Brownfields Task Force Issues Action Plan
The New Jersey Brownfields Redevelopment Task Force adopted a new Action Plan on June 5, 2000. The Action Plan consists of two components: an overall plan for the redevelopment of brownfields in the state and an interagency action plan.
The overall plan contains several notable objectives, such as creating an inventory of brownfields in the state that includes the relative interest of developers in each site and prioritizing the sites by weighing the "supply" versus the "demand." Other objectives include more active marketing of brownfields; greater involvement of communities and municipalities in reclaiming brownfields; strengthening partnerships among realtors, developers, financial institutions, government and the public; and heightened efforts to publicize brownfields success stories.
The interagency plan contemplates greater cooperation among State agencies involved in brownfields projects through more frequent meetings, seminars to educate staff, sharing of resources and techniques, and the use of a "team" concept among the state agencies to coordinate and expedite redevelopment projects through interagency systems.
Report Urges More State Control Over Brownfields
A report issued on July 10, 2000 by the Competitive Enterprise Institute ("CEI") entitled Revitalizing Urban America: Cleaning Up the Brownfields urges greater State control over brownfields projects. The report discusses at length redevelopment difficulties encountered when brownfields sites are also regulated under CERCLA. The report recommends that federal requirements for urban brownfields should be separated from the cleanup and liability standards for listed Superfund sites in order to give states more control over remediation and redevelopment.
According to the report, states have been highly successful at administering their brownfields programs despite federal rules that may provide disincentives to redevelopers. These disincentives arise because cleanups of brownfields, which are usually low-risk abandoned industrial sites that may or may not be mildly contaminated, are regulated under CERCLA, which generally sets guidelines for remediation of the nation's most contaminated sites.
The liability concerns raised by the report were also emphasized by a recent Senate bill (S. 2700) introduced on June 8, 2000. According to the report, however, this bill falls short of the necessary liability reform because it seeks to include broad reforms of Superfund along with the brownfields legislation. CEI recommends that legislation to remove the CERCLA liability for purchasers of brownfield sites should be done separately from any attempts to reform the overall Superfund program. The report concludes that states are severely impeded by federal policies that prevent them from protecting developers from liability or from developing their own rules for site remediation.
Brownfields 2000 Conference
The Brownfields 2000 Conference was held on October 11-13, 2000 in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The conference consisted of several tracks serving to share ideas and resources for the redevelopment of the state's brownfields. These tracks included Brownfields Fundamentals; The Three E's - Economics, Environment and Equity; Creating Value and Future Use; Former Uses and Managing Liability and Risk; Marketplace of Ideas; and Lessons from the Field. In order to present something different at this year's conference, this past spring the sponsors solicited the submission of papers to help develop the technical program of the conference.
