Feature

Bartsch says progress is faster than ever

Looking back at how brownfields perceptions and regulations have changed in the last 10 years, Charlie Bartsch--described as the godfather of brownfields by people nationwide--says we’ve finally made that connection between development and the environment.

Once the two terms were kept on separate tracks, never intersecting or coming together, says Bartsch, vice president of ICF International in Washington, D.C. Today, that’s no longer true. People have learned that with the attention to one will come the success of the other.

What brownfields really did was show how critical this crosscut is, he says.

Progress in brownfields has been slow and steady, but speed is picking up. In fact, great strides have been made in recent years. “(Progress) is moving much more quickly than it ever has,” Bartsch says.

Bartsch should know. Not only a pioneer and staunch advocate in the field, he coined the phrase brownfield in 1992 while sitting in the lounge of a Chicago hotel. A frustrated Bartsch stated to colleagues that he was tired of talking about greenfields. It was time to start talking about brownfields, he told them. And the term stuck.

Bartsch’s frustration came at a time when a couple of court cases extended the Superfund framework to lightly contaminated sites and implicated lenders in the liability chain. While these cases would later become rare, capital for projects looking at some contamination hurdles practically dried up overnight.

And so this new term Bartsch created got off to a rough start. The simple word was an instant deal killer--a piranha that incited fear in the real estate industry, Bartsch says. Even today some small banks still refuse to step into the brownfields arena.

One of the greatest advancements in brownfields over the years has been that people no longer view it with this doomsday perspective, Bartsch says. “It isn’t an automatic black plague in real estate,” he says.

Instead, brownfields are viewed as deals that happen to have some “environmental wrinkles,” he says. In real estate and its redevelopment, the environment has become just another factor to deal with.

Now there are brownfields success stories in every state. Many have put brownfields incentives to work in the local communities. In the Pacific Northwest, one of its great strengths is that local organizations, governments and nonprofits have become very adept at the informational piece of brownfields, Bartsch says. While the communities may not have many cash resources, there’s much informational brokering going on. And in a strong real estate market, this information packaging is making property move, he says.

Bartsch attributes the change in the perception of brownfields to the rapid advances in cleanup technology and the acceptance of institutional and land-use controls. These advances have cut costs and brought in many new players--environmental firms and others from the private sector--who weren’t around early on.

Bartsch sees technology continuing to play a major factor in the future of brownfields and their revitalization. States’ roles also will continue to grow stronger and more sophisticated. We’ll see more local efforts in the way of incentives and tax strategies. And federal resource strategies will continue to diversify because people are getting better at plugging the financial gaps with a variety of programs and funding sources, he predicts.

Bartsch also warns that in the future states must determine how to tackle new issues as these cleaned up sites are resold. For example, what happens when a former brownfield zoned for light industry is sold to someone looking to build condos on it? Even more challenging will be ensuring that institutional controls and land-use restrictions on a property are monitored over time, even when the property changes ownership.

It will take only a couple of cases where a community didn’t have the proper oversight in place for these issues to get plenty of national attention, Bartsch warns. Such problems could negatively impact the use of these properties all over the country.

Bartsch is pleased by the progress brownfields have made in the last 10 years; however, he’s not surprised by it. Once officials were able to demystify the brownfields process, progress followed, he says. And in many ways the brownfields process has paved the way for sustainability in redevelopment. What brownfields have done is get people thinking more about their communities and the direction they want them to head.

And that, perhaps, is the biggest accomplishment in the long run, he says.

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Problem Solver

Program uses interagency approach to tackle troublesome sites

A unique pilot program in Washington’s King County is now being used as a model for other counties throughout the state.

The Interagency Compliance Team of King County (ICT) was established to address troublesome properties posing a contamination threat to the environment. It was started with grant monies from the EPA’s State and Tribal Response Program, and relies on a collaborative interagency approach to achieve compliance from noncompliant sites subject to multi-agency regulation. Using a secure Web site for communication between the agencies, the program is able to maximize local, state and federal resources and get problem sites cleaned up.

So just what does this program have to do with brownfields?

The ICT is preventing the creation of more brownfields, says John Means, brownfields grant manager for the Washington Department of Ecology (DOE). By intervening early at sites likely to cause environmental contamination and then bringing these troublesome sites into compliance, the program is preventing the sites from erupting into a much larger health problem for a community, he explains. And, that also means the program is saving money down the line in remediation costs.

“We don’t need more brownfields,” Means says. “We have plenty.”

Formerly called the Troublesome Sites Workgroup and renamed the ICT in 2005, the program began in 2000 with a partnership between DOE’s Hazardous Waste Program and the King County Local Hazardous Waste Management Program. The pilot project was established because of a need to pull together agencies’ efforts. Some sites were slipping through the cracks because there are so many agencies involved with so many jurisdictions, Means says. In other cases, property owners were manipulating the system and not working toward compliance.

The group includes regulators representing local, state and federal agencies working to promote compliance with environmental regulations. The county dedicated a prosecutor to deal with enforcement actions and measures with property owners. More than 130 members have participated in the ICT at some time. That’s more than two-dozen agencies, says Elliott Zimmermann of the DOE.

Among the ICT’s tools is its secure Web site. The site allows anyone from any agency to post documents, photos, field notes and other information about a troublesome site in King County. The Web site includes a list of specific sites with a contact list of the agency people working on it. It’s one large depository of information, Zimmermann says.

Sites targeted by ICT usually have chronic environmental issues that draw public complaints. In the program’s beginning, the ICT was dealing primarily with junkyards. Common problems include containers and drums of hazardous waste abandoned on someone’s property, hazardous wastes generated by a business owner claiming not to have the resources to properly manage it, solid waste abandoned at a business or residential property, abandoned vehicles, leaking underground tanks, and mismanaged wastewater issues, according to a report by the ICT.

The ICT estimates it costs $2.2 million annually to address the various sites. However, King County officials now realize it costs less to fund this program than it does to send out law enforcement officials to deal with them. So King County took over its own operations this year, dedicating prosecutor time and a staff position to the ICT. The King County program has transitioned off the EPA grant, leaving grant dollars to expand the program to other counties.

And the program’s success isn’t going unnoticed. Last year, Washington’s Skagit, Snohomish, Whatcom and Island counties began putting together a team following the ICT model, says Zimmermann, who knows of no similar program targeting troublesome sites in other states. A program is expected to start in Clark County and officials in Spokane and Yakima counties also are showing an interest, he says. He would like to see a program in all the major urban areas throughout the state.

Zimmermann believes the pilot program has been a success. In some cases, the ICT has been able to get a property cleaned up before it turned into a huge remediation project, he says. And that means fewer brownfields in King County.

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Groundwork

Institutional controls give new life to former landfill

After tackling such tenacious problems as methane contamination, developers that turned a former landfill into a major retail and office development in Tualatin, Ore., are happy to see the project is experiencing less stressful troubles.

“The problem people have now is it’s so successful, that parking is very tight down there,” Bruce Wood, president of Foundation Real Estate Development, says of Bridgeport Village. Wood previously worked for the company that developed Bridgeport Village.

With advances in technology and cleanup methods, former landfills are becoming more attractive as redevelopment projects. Bridgeport Village is one example of what can be done with such land.

Only 10 miles south of Portland, Bridgeport Village is described as a premier outdoor shopping, eating and entertainment experience in Oregon. The 478,000-square-foot development, which also includes a four-story parking garage, sits on 29 acres. It was the 10th largest retail development in the country when it opened, Wood says.

Built on the former Durham Quarry, the site was purchased by Washington County in the early 1950s to use as a gravel quarrying operation. In the late 1970s, the county hired a contractor to fill up the 90-foot deep quarry with clean fill, such as construction and demolition waste.

However, organic plant materials and wood waste from construction sites also made their way into the landfill. The decomposition of organic materials produces methane. While the gas is a naturally occurring compound, too much of it can cause health problems or even an explosion.

The high levels of methane found during the Phase I and II environmental site assessments came as a surprise, raising much concern among developers as well as the public, Wood says. Dealing with this issue delayed the project by a year, and increased the cost by about $5 million. The project cost about $100 million.

To deal with the methane, engineering and institutional controls were put in place:

• An active gas extraction system was placed around portions of the interior and perimeter of the site at various depths to suck out the methane on the property.
• A passive sub-slab venting system and a low permeability gas membrane were installed beneath each building slab. The thick membrane is made of impermeable plastic.
• Low permeability membrane collars or trench plugs were installed for every utility that enters or exits each building or crosses a site boundary.
• Interior gas sensors and monitors were installed on buildings and closed areas that aren’t ventilated. No sensors have ever gone off, Wood says.
• An ongoing process of monitoring will continue until the methane levels are at acceptable levels.

The project, which was started in 2000 and did not fully open until May 2005, had many hurdles, including finding ways to structurally support buildings sitting on 90 feet of unstructured fill. But three years of good planning is one reason for its success, Wood says. The people involved in this project had to be creative and stay on track. Public and private entities also worked hard at cooperating and reaching decisions quickly.

“It’s an example of a public-private partnership that went really well,” Wood says.

The outcome is a major bonus for the surrounding community. About $8.5 million in offsite improvements were made as a result of the project, $14 million was paid to the county for the land, the development is expected to generate $4 to $5 million annually in property taxes alone and hundreds of jobs were created. On top of all this, a blighted site that sat between two cities was cleaned up and reborn into a signature destination for the area.

“It’s hard to put a dollar number on that,” Wood says.

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About this newsletter.

To help raise awareness of the economic and environmental benefits of redevelopment, Building on Brownfields brings you news and information on brownfields in EPA Region 10: Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and Washington. The newsletter is funded by the EPA through Washington state's Department of Ecology, and is a cooperative effort between the four states and the EPA.

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