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Playing Catch-Up on Brownfields
State may soon follow neighbors' lead in creating incentives for cleanup
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Business New Haven
3/20/2000
By: Michael C. Bingham
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Brownfields reclamation.
There's something to break out the party hats and noisemakers about.
More likely, for most thinking, feeling adults, the too-much-talked-about-but-too-little-done-about subject of remediating Connecticut's so-called brownfields induces a state of MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) stupefaction.
Even so, it's important.
It's important to revitalizing cities, since urban centers lack virgin property for commercial development. Thus attracting new companies to cities likely means putting them where another company (or two, or more) once was. Since cities like New Haven and Bridgeport were built by manufacturing, much presently unused commercial property is subject to contamination.
Somebody has to clean it up before it can be returned to productive use. But that somebody is unlikely to be a new tenant or buyer, who has the option of locating to unspoiled land in, say, Branford or Wallingford.
As part of the urban revitalization component of its 2000 legislative agenda, the Connecticut Business & Industry Association (CBIA) urges finding ways for the state “to accelerate and make more cost-effective the cleanup of contaminated urban sites.” It also recommends the creation of “public-private partnerships” to create incentives to clean up fallow former industrial sites.
Your tax dollars at work.
CBIA associate counsel Eric J. Brown points out that brownfields reclamation is just one piece of the business group's overall urban revitalization initiative. Nevertheless, “It's a piece that we've been focused on for a number of years.”
Brown says the business group would like to see uniform cleanup standards for the state as well as the development of more voluntary cleanup programs.
“Many building blocks have been put in place the last few years to get the process going,” Brown notes. But the biggest remaining obstacle, according to Brown, is financing cleanup of contaminated sites.
To create financial incentives to remediate brownfields, CBIA supports awarding tax incentives and liability protections for developers of dirty sites. S.B. 516, the subject of a March 14 hearing before the legislature's commerce committee, would hold brownfields redevelopers blameless in lawsuits stemming from cleanup of properties or the discovery of hitherto undiscovered contaminants. Brown says CBIA supports the measure.
OOther states such as New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey have created funds that help pay directly for cleanup costs on abandoned urban properties. To date, state government in Connecticut has played a more limited role. The state does make money available to municipalities to fund environmental investigations of brownfields site, says Brown, but has participated financially in their cleanup in relatively few instances.
By contrast, the Bay State's 18-month-old Brownfields Act limited liability of brownfields redevelopers and created a $15 million fund to guarantee private-sector loans for remediation costs. A $30 million Brownfields Redevelopment Fund was created to provide direct, low-interest loans and grants of up to $50,000 for site assessments and $500,000 for actual cleanup, with “priority” projects eligible for up to $2 million.
The Nutmeg State may soon adopt a similar, more pro-active stance. Bridgeport State Rep. Lee A. Samowitz (D-129) has introduced legislation that he says “would provide future tax credit incentives for brownfields developers who can demonstrate their project will generate more tax revenue than a site's current unused condition,” he says. “In addition to private investors, quasi-state agencies such as the Connecticut Resource Recovery Authority and Connecticut Development Authority could also use their tax-exempt bonding authority to invest in or make loans available for brownfields cleanup.”
The idea, according to State Sen. Martin Looney (D-11), “is to create a larger pool of funds available for brownfields remediation, particularly in central cities” such as New Haven, which Looney represents. This might take the form of an expanded loan fun or an expanded grant fund, Looney says.
Additionally, Looney says tax incentives for brownfields redevelopment “may” be enacted this legislative session once lawmakers determine “what the revenue-loss implications would be over time, to see how the tax code might be structured in such a way to make it both a [sufficient] incentive for cleanup, but also affordable [to taxpayers].”
Neither Samowitz nor Looney is ready to stake the farm on concrete legislative action on brownfields this spring. “It's difficult to get consensus on anything in the short session [which adjourns on May 3]. But I'm hopeful we'll be able to move forward on at least expanded attention to the brownfields problem.”
For the state's aging cities, bound by inelastic municipal borders, the stakes are high. In most of them the only large parcels of land available for development are contaminated or at least presumed to be fouled.
“The revitalization of urban areas is a multi-pronged effort,” says CBIA's Brown. “One of the things that makes a brownfield more attractive to a developer is if the urban area itself is an attractive place to do business. There's a micro and macro view. At CBIA we're pushing to make [the state's] urban areas in general more attractive, for instance [by improving] transportation access.
“If you make cities more attractive, brownfields redevelopment will follow.” And vice-versa.
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