Brownfields Success Stories

GIS Information Leads to Action (or No Further Action) in Emeryville

In the spring of 1996, EPA awarded Emeryville, California a $200,000 Brownfields Pilot grant designed to facilitate redevelopment of the City's abandoned or underused industrial areas. Rather than using this grant to target one specific site, Emeryville used some of this funding to gather, organize, and analyze all available information on more than 500 City properties.

Armed with this mass of data, the Pilot developed a Geographic Information System (GIS) computer model--known as a "One-Stop Shop" to potential purchasers and developers--that provides information on soil and groundwater contamination, assessment findings, planning issues, land use/zoning concerns, and property ownership at the touch of a button. This entire database was made available over the Internet, at: http://www.ci.emeryville.ca.us/bf/brownfields.html. Several property owners have already used information provided through the One-Stop Shop to move forward their redevelopment plans.

The owner of the 10-acre, former Grove Valve site used the system to obtain "No Further Action" status on the property. The vacant site had been under a cloud of suspected environmental contamination for years, but its new status enabled the property to be sold for redevelopment into a retail and distribution facility, a separate, high-technology facility, and a parking garage.

Construction workers are now renovating a 200,000-square-foot building on the site, a project that has created 20 temporary jobs. This project will result in an estimated $200,000 a year in tax revenue for the City, and create 200 full-time jobs.

Additional successes include an idle, five-acre Emeryville property now undergoing cleanup, after the owner used the GIS database to determine assessment and cleanup strategies; a one-acre, underutilized salvage yard that will soon be redeveloped into new office space; and a former trucking facility, where a prospective purchaser committed $50,000 to perform further environmental assessments.

The One-Stop Shop also helped provide regulatory assistance to an interested developer, which led to development of a parcel that had sat vacant for 15 years. Construction of a new, 250,000-square-foot office building on the site is expected to generate $300,000 in annual property taxes for the City. For more information on the Emeryville Brownfields Pilot, contact Ignacio Dayrit at (510) 596-4350.