The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has announced the selection of $6.85 million in Brownfields Grants to communities in Oregon. Nationwide, $267 million in grants are being awarded.

Federal grant recipients must satisfy legal and administrative requirements to receive funds from EPA, an EPA press release states. Brownfield Grants include Assessment, Revolving Loan Fund, and Cleanup Grants.

Assessment Grants will provide funding for brownfield inventories, planning, environmental assessments and community outreach. Oregon is receiving four Assessment Grants.

• The city of Beaverton will receive $500,000;
• Northwest Oregon Economic Alliance will receive $1.2 million;
• the city of Portland will receive $500,000; and
• Tillamook County will receive $500,000.

Cleanup Grants will provide money to carry out cleanup activities at brownfield sites owned by the recipient. Oregon is receiving three Cleanup Grants.

• The city of Astoria will receive $2 million;
• the North Plains Urban Renewal Agency will receive $500,000; and
• the city of Portland will receive $500,000.

Supplemental Revolving Loan Fund Grants are awarded to high-performing recipients to help communities continue their work to carry out cleanup and redevelopment projects on contaminated brownfield properties. Supplemental funding for Revolving Loan Fund Grants is available to recipients that have depleted their funds and have viable cleanup projects ready for work. Oregon has one recipient of a Supplemental RFL Grant:

• The Oregon Business Development Department will receive $650,000.

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Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services has awarded a $200,000 grant to help pay for environmental cleanup of a property that formerly housed a battery manufacturing plant.

The money came out of the city’s Brownfield Revolving Loan Fund, which in 2011 was established via $1 million awarded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The grant dollars will aid remediation at 2140 N. Williams Ave., where Wagstaff Battery Manufacturing Co. formerly operated.

BRIDGE Housing, a nonprofit, plans to redevelop the property by building a four-story, 61-unit affordable housing complex. The Portland Housing Bureau and Multnomah County will help pay for the project, which under a city policy will include 10 units with priority given to displaced former residents.

“This grant is an investment in our community, helping to create healthy neighborhoods, while providing deeply affordable housing in a historically underserved neighborhood,” Commissioner Nick Fish said. “It’s a win-win-win.”

The Portland Brownfield Program has so far helped address environmental concerns on more than 100 acres, according to the city.

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The city of Portland is moving toward offering tax incentives to developers of brownfield properties.

The City Council has directed staff members to come up with a package of property tax breaks to encourage development of Portland’s approximately 910 acres of environmentally contaminated brownfield properties.

Commissioner Nick Fish, who sponsored the directive, said the tax breaks could be used for industrial or residential projects.

“The focus will be on job creation and affordable housing,” Fish said in an interview. “We anticipate the tax incentive will be structured so the tax incentive is greater if you give a greater public benefit.”

For example, a developer would be eligible for a 50 percent property tax abatement for building market-rate apartments, with a bonus for affordable units and a further bonus for “deeply affordable” units.

“When the incentive plan is up and running, it will be another tool in our kit to put these brownfields to productive use,” Fish said.

Fish said he expects the program to be running within a year.

Local governments in Oregon were authorized to offer brownfield incentives by state legislation in 2016. The Oregon Brownfield Coalition – including the city of Portland, environmental groups and business organizations – lobbied for its passage. Cities, counties and ports such as the Port of Portland are able to offer incentives for brownfield development.

The city of Portland is the first municipality to move forward with brownfield subsidies.

In practice, the city of Portland would use tax breaks as the major incentive for brownfield development.

“A significant piece of our comprehensive plan is a big push to put brownfields to productive use,” Fish said. “We’re running out of land, so the next best thing is redeveloping brownfields for a productive use. Put this land back on the tax rolls and drive the jobs agenda.”

Fish pointed to an ongoing success story: the brownfield reclamation of a Port of Portland-owned parcel in Troutdale Reynolds Industrial Park that is now set to be a major Amazon fulfillment center.

BRIDGE Housing, a nonprofit organization, is familiar with brownfield projects and the costs involved.

“We’ve done quite a bit of development on brownfield sites,” said Cynthia Parker, president and chief executive. “As land becomes more elusive, it’s important to be able to reclaim some of these properties that have been polluted.”

Several major construction firms, or their subcontractors, are capable of performing the necessary remediation work, she said.

“We have to remediate to the very highest standard because it’s for residential use,” she said. “We’re not afraid of it. It just costs money.”

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development also runs a grant program to help cities pay for brownfield cleanup.

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Vancouver, Wash.-based environmental engineering and planning firm Maul Foster & Alongi has received national recognition for its part in the cleanup and redevelopment of a 32-acre brownfield in Portland‘s South Waterfront District.

The Coasts, Oceans, Ports and Rivers Institute awarded the firm a 2014 Project Excellence Award in the large project category for the Zidell Marine Corp. property cleanup completed in 2011.

The award is one of two given out annually by COPRI, a semi-autonomous institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Maul Foster & Alongi President Jim Maul said it was an honor for the firm to earn the sole large project award.

“It really is a pretty significant acknowledgement,” he said.

Firm staffers worked closely with the Zidell Marine Corp. property owners and other project team members to restore the contaminated site without disrupting its ongoing use as a barge construction facility. During the cleanup, nearly 20,000 cubic yards of soil contaminated with industrial chemicals was removed from the riverbank in coordination with Tilikum Crossing transit bridge construction nearby.

Maul Foster & Alongi staffers also helped design an 11-acre cap to prevent hazardous chemicals from leaching into the Willamette River, Maul said. The award judges were impressed by the firm’s integration of science and engineering for the project, he said.

“There was a lot of science and complex modeling that was incorporated into the design of the cap,” he said.

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Maul Foster & Alongi President Jim Maul has seen what he describes as a paradigm shift in the forces driving brownfield cleanups in the Portland–metro region.

“People began to realize if they were going to go in and cap a site, it could be a parking lot or a building,” he said, “so we started looking at the economics of the cleanup.”

Maul, a co-founder of the Vancouver, Wash.-based environmental engineering and planning firm, said specialization in assessment of redevelopment potential of sites contaminated by past industrial use has paid off. As the economy rebounds and the demand for urban infill grows, firm staffers are seeing an increase in private efforts to clean up and develop brownfield sites.

“We were hearing from a lot of our clients that there was a real demand for land-use planning,” Maul said. “We realized we were a very competent brownfield company … We came at it both from the technical end and the policy side.”

Maul Foster & Alongi’s experience with prominent cleanups like the Zidell Marine Corp. property in the South Waterfront District has led to recent work on brownfield inventories for Metro and the cities of Portland and Beaverton. The goal behind the inventories is to encourage public-private partnerships to clean up and breathe new life into the region’s brownfields, including old mills and former gas stations and auto shops, Maul said.

“Today, the majority of cleanups are driven by market forces,” he said.

Brownfield inventory work involves investigating which contaminated sites have the greatest potential for redevelopment and most community interest. City officials can then reach out to property owners to find out what would be required for cleanup and redevelopment to take place.

“To me, it’s a little bit like a public works project,” Maul said. “Development is the remedy. What are the tools that allow that to occur?”

The process involves a comprehensive look at each site: Professionals analyze the zoning, past and current land use, nearby transportation corridors and sensitive environmental areas like wetlands, said Ted Wall, Maul Foster & Alongi Oregon operations manager and principal engineer.

“You go from hundreds and hundreds of parcels to a few,” he said. “As the number of sites gets to a manageable number, there will be outreach to those property owners to see what is possible – what the city can do.”

One measure to encourage private development on brownfields involves changing the perception that environmental contamination poses a barrier, Wall said. State programs provide funding and low-interest loans to assist planning and cleanup so that sites are restored to productive use.

“The economics of the environmental component are manageable within the economics of the development,” Wall said. “The environmental components are nothing but another line item on the pro forma.”

One project that benefited from state cleanup funding was Ava Roasteria, a downtown Beaverton coffee shop that formerly was a gas station. The project is one reason why Beaverton city officials are undertaking a brownfields inventory, Wall said.

“It’s a good example of a property going from dormant and really a blight to something successful,” he said. “(Beaverton officials are) trying to replicate that.”

Cheyenne Chapman, a legal policy analyst with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, said the stigma surrounding brownfields is starting to dissipate, especially in the wake of the recession. She coordinates the DEQ‘s Prospective Purchaser Agreement program in which the extent of contamination on a brownfield site is assessed and a cleanup plan is created during a change in ownership. Currently, about a dozen projects in Oregon are going through this process, she said.

“We’ve had a steady uptick in the number of inquiries that are coming in and a rise in applications,” she said. “As the economy picks up, it might be (that) reusing these sites in one form or another becomes more attractive.”

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The complexities of building atop a long-vacant landfill soon became apparent for the team creating a Buddhist retreat in Northeast Portland.

The Dharma Rain Zen Center will include a 6,200-square-foot meditation hall and eventually 31 apartment-like units on 14 acres of the 26-acre H.G. LaVelle Landfill site. Redevelopment of that brownfield is being overseen by the Department of Environmental Quality and posed a host of challenges.

Before work could begin, the project team had to figure out how it would build upon a mountain of unstable soil that included roughly 2 million cubic yards of solid waste. Typically, pilings would be driven deep into the ground for support, said Gant Enderle, principal of B&G Builders – the project’s general contractor. That approach was used to build a Home Depot store on a former landfill site in Oregon City, he said.

“It took a bit of work to try and figure out what the best approach was,” he said. “We could have sunk piles down into terra firma, but it would have cost a lot of money.”

The project team, including Tigard-based GeoDesign Inc., looked at several options and eventually settled on one that required pouring 10 feet of dirt interspersed with a specially designed, mesh “geo-mat” fabric. The test took three months and the dirt only settled about three inches during that time, Enderle said.

Developers also have taken special steps to meet DEQ requirements that the threat of methane release be eliminated, said Mike Coenen, an associate engineer for GeoDesign.

The hazards of methane gas appear only when it is allowed to accumulate, according to Coenen. That made design of building ventilation systems critical.

“What we’ve done is to incorporate features into the design of the building that do not allow it to accumulate,” he said.

GeoDesign raised the foundation of the meditation building, essentially putting it on tiny stilts to ensure sufficient air space will be available for ventilation between the floor and the ground, Coenen said. The building will have sub slab vents allowing natural ventilation and preventing methane buildup.

For the development’s smaller buildings, GeoDesign used a passive venting system so that methane can disperse, he said.

CWK2 designed a pressurized sanitary sewer pump system, rather than a gravity sanitary sewer, to keep utilities closer to the surface, Enderle said.

“With a pressurized system, you don’t have to slope it; it is easier to access and fix,” he said. “The trade-off is you have to replace it every 25 years.”

Special considerations also were made to ensure water from the site will not enter the landfill. In a typical development, water would be treated on site before going into the city’s sewer system. At the Dharma Rain site, the water must be kept at surface level so that it can be treated off-site, Coenen said.

“We have to line our stormwater swales and treat the water above ground,” he said. “Then it goes down off-site.”

Dharma Rain’s development team, in its due diligence phase, worked closely with the city’s Bureau of Environmental Services to get a pair of grants – one for $50,000 to pay for an environmental site assessment and one for $200,000 to pay for cleanup, said Jenn Bildersee, coordinator of the Portland Brownfield Program.

The grants, which came from the Environmental Protection Agency through BES, helped clear the way for Dharma Rain to purchase the property in 2012, Bildersee said.

“The grant is for innocent purchasers who did not cause the damage and gives them liability protection,” she said. “This helps so that people don’t have to be afraid to purchase a contaminated site as long as they take appropriate steps to clean up the site.”

Dharma Rain also got support from the Madison South neighborhood. Volunteers contributed thousands of hours to clean up the site, said Kakumyo Lowe-Charde, the nonprofit’s development director.

“This has been a site that has been an eyesore for the community and a haven for drug use and prostitution,” he said. “Neighbors were eager to take an active role.”

Financing for the project came in part from the sale of Dharma Rain’s three buildings in the Hawthorne neighborhood. The organization has moved its operations into temporary facilities until construction is completed.

Additional financing will come from the sale of membership interest in the development, which includes the right to rent one of the apartment-like units that will be constructed next summer. Twenty-five memberships have been sold, Lowe-Charde said.

Dharma Rain Zen Center, first phase

Address: 8500 N.E. Siskiyou St.

Owner: Dharma Rain Zen Center

Project cost: $5 million

Construction start date: August 2014

Anticipated completion date: February 2015

General contractor: B&G Builders

Architect: Howells Architecture + Design

Engineers: CWK2 (civil), Horn Consulting Engineers (structural), GeoDesign Inc. (geotechnical)

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Approximately 2,300 contaminated and underutilized properties exist in the Portland–metro area, and according to a new report, they possess a lot of potential.

“Even if only one-fourth of the suspected brownfields are redeveloped in those areas, then we could meet our 20-year housing demand that we measured in the urban growth report,” said Miranda Bateschell, a senior planner with Metro’s community development division. “That’s important.”

Bateschell, along with Metro Policy Advisory Committee members, recently released findings of the . It’s the first concentrated attempt to diagnose the severity of Portland’s brownfield problem and prescribe some solutions.

Among other things, it found that brownfield redevelopment could have a significant impact on housing, employment and tax revenue – but numerous, large barriers stand in the way.

“The challenges are financial costs, the risk or uncertainty, and liability issues, which impede transactions,” Bateschell said. “Lenders need to know the condition before they’re willing to lend on a site, and it takes a lot of money to just figure out what the situation is on a site.”

For instance, the Tualatin Hills Park and Recreation District is working to turn a former gas station site into park land. Hal Bergsma, the district’s planning director, said the cost to excavate contaminated soils from the property was approximately $118,000. That didn’t include the cost of consulting and analysis. A $150,000 grant aided the park district.

“We probably could have afforded it, but if we spent funds on the cleanup work, then that meant we couldn’t spend funds on the other things that are really our main mission, which is to provide parks and recreation services to people in our district,” Bergsma said.

The report included recommendations to facilitate the cleanup process. They included creating tax credits and tax abatements for remediation, and changing laws that dissuade cleanup.

Bateschell said Oregon law allows assessed value reductions for properties with environmental contamination. Oftentimes, owners will use that reduction, but simply hold their properties.

“What this does, even though it isn’t the purpose, is that even though (the site) is impaired, it doesn’t create any incentive for the property owner to do something on the site,” Bateschell said.

Other recommendations included creating programs to help facilitate acquisition and redevelopment of brownfield properties. This could be done by providing low-interest loans to the private sector, selling publicly financed properties to private interests, or improving the regulatory process between local, state and federal agencies.

Bateschell said cleanup of a significant number of properties would move from infeasible to feasible with just a 5 percent reduction in the soft costs associated with permitting and assessment. Corky Collier, executive director of the , and a member of the committee that developed the report, said change is long overdue.

“We need to get these places cleaned up,” he said. “They’re contaminated, they’re not good for the environment and they’re not good for our health. And we’ve been sitting on our hands not doing anything about it for decades. This is shameful.”

Remediation could be lucrative. Over the next 20 years, the region is projected to gain as many as 38,800 households, which could put outward pressure on the urban growth boundary. But if all brownfields within the UGB were redeveloped, approximately 138,000 dwelling units could be added.

The report estimates that remediation of all brownfields could create space for 69,000 additional jobs worth $3.3 billion in wages, and between $324 million and $427 million in property taxes. Additionally, if 100 percent of the brownfield sites were redeveloped, annual carbon dioxide emissions would be reduced by 127,000 metric tons – the equivalent of emissions by 30,000 cars.

Collier believes brownfield redevelopment is an opportunity for the state.

“If government can help finance the gap between what a business can afford to redevelop and what’s needed for brownfield redevelopment, then in a matter of a handful of years that financing is paid back and you now have jobs on that property and you have tax revenue rolling into the state, year after year,” he said. “It’s basically free money; it’s an incredible return on value for government.”

Bateschell said the report represents only a start and that she will visit Metro Council in January or February to continue the dialogue.

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A multimillion-dollar urban park project in Astoria recently received a financing boost from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The Heritage Square project will receive $200,000 to conduct an environmental assessment of the park site and another $200,000 for cleanup activities, according to Susan Morales, an EPA brownfield coordinator based in Seattle.

The city broke ground in April on the Heritage Square project, which will transform a full block of the downtown area into a new Chinese garden, market plaza, boardwalk and amphitheater.

But part of the site includes a section of Duane Street that was once occupied by an auto repair shop, dry cleaner and later a printer. Because those businesses may have left behind toxins in the soil and groundwater, the EPA considers the site a brownfield, and the project thus qualifies for funding to help redevelop it.

Astoria was one of nine cities to win a chunk of the $3.8 million that the EPA distributed as part of its new “multi-purpose” grant program, which is a pilot effort in which the agency distributes funds for brownfield assessment and cleanup simultaneously.

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Yes, there is an award for everything nowadays – even brownfields. Four awards will be given at this year’s in Salem to recognize the redevelopment of worthless pits into blooming job hubs.

Why do these projects deserve awards? Because redeveloping a brownfield is usually much more difficult (and costly) than building new. Brownfields – usually contaminated, long vacant or otherwise undesirable – are the rotten properties that no one else wants to touch. Considering Oregon’s sustainable reputation, we should really see more projects like this.

So without further ado, kudos go to…

• The June Key Delta Community Center: A former gas station in North Portland was transformed into a sustainably designed community space for the Delta Sigma Theta sorority, which spent $131,000 to purchase and improve the site.
• Sunriver Homeowners Aquatic & Recreation Center: A vacant, asbestos?ridden amphitheater into an aquatic center and outdoor recreation area. Partners included the Sunriver Owners Association and the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.
• The Tabor Commons: What was once a convenience store plagued by crime and drug dealing was redeveloped into Southeast Portland’s , a nonprofit, family-oriented coffee house and community center. Partners included Business Oregon and the city of Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services and Brownfield Program.
• Zidell site: A 30-acre waterfront parcel owned by , the real estate arm of barge builder , underwent remediation for future redevelopment. Formerly used for shipping, the site just south of the Ross Island Bridge is now covered with vegetation and is planned to one day be home to mixed-use or commercial development.

The awards will be presented at a luncheon during the conference, which is being held by with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, the Northwest Environmental Business Council and the Center for Creative Land Recycling.

For more information on the city of Portland’s Brownfields Program, contact Karen Homolac at 503-986-0191 or 971-239-9951.

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What is a brownfield?

A tract of land that has been developed for industrial purposes, polluted, and then abandoned.

source: www.merriam-webster.com

Metro and the city of Portland recently signed an intergovernmental agreement that will provide the city with approximately $100,000 for a brownfield redevelopment study.

The city is hoping that the Brownfield Redevelopment Assessment, set to take place over the next six to eight months, will accelerate redevelopment – particularly for industrial projects.

“An economic opportunities analysis for the Portland Plan found that only about one-third of the brownfield acreage in the city is expected to be cleaned up in the next 25 years,” said Steve Kountz, a city planner.

Even an industrial cleanup of the Zidell barge-building site merely transformed land into multiuse commercial and residential space; it did not address a growing need for industrial land, said Jonna Papaefthimiou, a planning and sustainability policy adviser for Mayor Sam Adams.

“Larger industrial brownfields are much harder to clean up; the work is expensive and often doesn’t pencil out because industrial land values are comparatively low,” Papaefthimiou said. “So, the issue is that market-based cleanup of industrial brownfields is slow or not happening at all.”

Kountz said the goal is to create recommendations to streamline redevelopment.

“There are many states and cities in the country that have more extensive programs (than Portland),” he said.

Tools could be created at local and state levels, Papaefthimiou said.

“The 2011 Legislature passed a bill on prospective purchaser agreements that will help resolve liability issues for investors who would buy brownfields and redevelop them. We expect that this will help draw more players into the market,” Papaefthimiou said. “Proposals for tax credits were a hard sell at the Legislature last year, given the fiscal climate. But this study is going to help us figure out what we can do next.”

Another goal of the study will be to look at “the cost of doing nothing,” according to Kountz. “We want to find the loss of tax revenues for new employment, and property tax revenues for redevelopment of those sites,” he said. “If (development) doesn’t happen here, it will go to other cities.”

Papaefthimiou added, “I’m very interested in the financial results of the study. My sense is that although brownfield redevelopment can be costly, letting so much industrial land sit idle is also costing us a lot.”

She said she hopes the information learned will help the city show “why this work is important.”

Meanwhile, the Home Builders Association of Metropolitan Portland is suing Metro over an extension of an excise tax program that provided the grant for the brownfield study. The tax program generates revenue from permit fees for new construction.

The association was involved in drafting the original program in 2004, HBA President Dave Nielsen said. But it wasn’t intended to pay for a brownfield study, he said.

“When it was created, it was supposed to provide funding for (urban growth boundary) expansion areas because they have no funding sources,” he said. “(The brownfield work is) an important program, or it could be, but that’s not what this tax is set up to fund.”

The HBA contends that there are other funding sources, including urban renewal money, to plan areas within its borders, and the excise tax program now primarily funds grants not part of its initial scope.

The case is being considered by the Oregon Court of Appeals, which heard oral arguments this fall and may render an opinion within a year, HBA Government Affairs Manager Justin Wood said.

If the court were to side with the HBA, the grant given for the brownfield program, as well as another grant given for planning the Barbur corridor, would no longer be valid. The city and Metro would share the “risk” of that funding issue, Kountz said.

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