Brownfields Supplemental Assistance Fact Sheet

PILOT SNAPSHOT
	Date of Announcement: March 2000 Amount: $150,000
Target Area: City of Portland, OR Profile: The City of Portland's supplemental assistance targets North/Northeast Portland, the part of the city with the most brownfields and the fewest of resources to address their redevelopment.

BACKGROUND

EPA awarded the City of Portland supplemental assistance for its Brownfields Assessment Demonstration Pilot. Portland was once the state's oldest and largest industrial, shipping, commercial, and urban center. Historically, the waterfront provided jobs to low-income and minority citizens in nearby North and Northeast Portland. Today, the manufacturing jobs have shrunk dramatically, leaving higher poverty and unemployment rates in these federally designated Enterprise Community (EC) neighborhoods.

The Pilot targets the North/Northeast section of Portland, the part of the city that has the highest number of brownfields in the city and the least amount of resources to engage in cleanup and redevelopment activities. Brownfields in this area are small sites, dispersed throughout residential and commercial nodes. Many of the brownfields remain in private hands, with owners of these properties faced with a choice of losing money by cleaning up and redeveloping the property or doing nothing with the property and perhaps losing less money. Suspected contamination and associated liability and cleanup costs have limited reuse of these sites, while pressure to develop new industry and urban homesites on adjacent farm and forest land continues to grow.

OBJECTIVES AND PLANNED ACTIVITIES

The city is beginning a development strategy that seeks to combine aggressive business recruitment, job creation, and urban revitalization with smart growth management, transportation planning, and environmental protection. The city recognizes that addressing brownfields is critical to realizing these long-term goals.

Portland will use the supplemental assistance to support ongoing efforts by the Portland Brownfields Showcase and the North/Northeast Portland Brownfields Showcase Community Advisory Committee (CAC) to facilitate the site identification, prioritization, and assessment of brownfields in the North/Northeast area of Portland that have the greatest potential for redevelopment. The funding will also be used to plan cleanup activities on sites approved by CAC and the Portland Brownfields Showcase.

To accomplish these objectives, the Pilot plans to:

. Identify three North/Northeast brownfields sites for further investigations;

. Collect, review, and analyze existing environmental documentation for selected sites and determine scope for testing and analysis at each site;

. Conduct Phase I site assessments at the three targeted sites; and

. Conduct Phase II site assessments, document results, prepare cleanup cost estimates, and identify cleanup options at the three targeted sites.

The cooperative agreement for this Pilot has not yet been negotiated; therefore, activities described in this fact sheet are subject to change.

CONTACTS

Regional Brownfields Team
U.S. EPA - Region 10
(206) 553-2100

Visit the EPA Region 10 Brownfields web site.

For further information, including specific Pilot contacts, additional Pilot information, brownfields news and events, and publications and links, visit the EPA Brownfields web site at:
http://www.epa.gov/brownfields/