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National
Land Reuse Initiative Links Brownfield Redevelopment With Superfund Cleanup Efforts
In stepped-up decade-long federal efforts to accelerate both
brownfield cleanup and redevelopment, a key goal of smart growth,
EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman -- flanked by Maryland
Governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. and Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley
-- launched a national ''Land Revitalization Agenda'' for linking
these priorities close together by inclusion of land reuse in the
Superfund, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) and
Underground Storage Tank pollution removal programs. In an event at
Baltimore Inner Harbor's 27-acre peninsular site of a former chrome
plant, which will become a mixed-use Harbor Point complex, the EPA
Administrator told the audience that cleanup, ''in and of itself, is
not enough,'' it must lead to ''good use of the now-clean land''
through partnerships with ''community and business leaders,
entrepreneurs and visionaries.'' The new 60-item agenda will help
EPA integrate land reuse into its cleanup programs by letting it
review liability issues related to property revitalization,
leverage grants across federal programs to facilitate area-wide
cleanup and multiple-site reuse, and pilot the use of written
documents on the readiness of once-contaminated sites for their
proper reuse. The Harbor Point site, chosen by Administrator
Whitman as the agenda's model for multi-level government and
community partnership and ''a showplace for revitalization,'' reports
Baltimore Sun writer Tom Pelton, had a 140-year pollution
history. As a result of a 1985 Sierra Club plan to sue the site's
post-1954 owner -- AlliedSignal, now Honeywell -- for polluting the
Chesapeake Bay, the company reached a court-ordered agreement to
clean and waterproof the ground under RCRA's Corrective Action
Program at a cost of more than $100 million. Subsequently, EPA's
Mid-Atlantic Region helped ensure site redevelopment through a
Smart Growth Memorandum of Agreement and a Prospective Lessee
Agreement with developers, protecting them from site cleanup
lawsuits, while Honeywell may still be liable. The developers,
Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse and H&S Properties, will turn the
site into a $400 million complex of offices and shops, with two
hotels, an 11-acre park and a waterfront promenade. Governor
Ehrlich said the project will generate jobs and tax revenue,
enhance the city skyline, stem sprawl and ease pressure on open
space. ''Brownfields cleanup is critically important from both an
environmental and economic development standpoint,'' he emphasized.
''It is an indispensable tool in the revitalization of urban
communities.'' Mayor O'Malley complimented the EPA for devising and
''now implementing the Land Revitalization Agenda to help remove one
of the last hurdles to redevelopment -- the fear of contamination
and the liability associated with the cleanup.'' -- Baltimore
Sun
4/10/2003
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