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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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