Brownfields Success Stories

Ecology in Partnership with Industry

Cape Charles, Virginia, a small, picturesque town on the southern tip of Virginia's Eastern Shore, is a model for how ecology works in tandem with industry. The town's Sustainable Technology Park Authority has worked hard to incorporate natural habitat protection into overall plans for an eco-industrial park in the heart of Cape Charles, where 27 percent of the town's 13,000 residents live below the poverty level. The President's Council on Sustainable Development selected Cape Charles as one of four sites for a national eco-industrial park demonstration project in August 1994; included in the millions of dollars from various public and private sources that have since been spent or earmarked to help redevelop the eco-park was a $200,000 EPA Brownfields Assessment Pilot award in September 1995. $70,000 in Brownfields Pilot funding was used to assess an abandoned 25-acre town dump at the heart of the future park, and mitigation plans are underway that will facilitate the site's eventual redevelopment. "This [EPA] funding," says Tim Hayes, Executive Director of the Sustainable Technology Park Authority, "is vital to the success of the entire project because access to the Park is contingent on redeveloping this brownfield." The Sustainable Technology Park Authority plans to use this site, along with some adjacent land, as a conference and training facility for the park. Construction of the Park's first building was completed in March 1999. The Park Authority will lease the 31,000-square-foot building to Energy Recovery, a manufacturing, research and development firm that plans to hire 50 local residents. A $2.5 million county bond paid for construction of the building, which will open in the summer of 1999. Another future tenant of the Park, Solar Building Systems, Inc., converted the town's former elementary school into a temporary factory while it waits for its new facility to become available. The company has already hired 30 local residents to assemble solar panels. Many of these workers had been layed off from a local crab processing plant, where they developed a manual dexterity that served them well in their new jobs. Approximately one-half of the land in the park is natural habitat, including the 30-acre Coastal Dune Natural Area Preserve and approximately 60 acres of other natural areas. The entire park is open to the public, and construction of walkways and trails--including a Chesapeake Bay overlook--is expected to be complete in the spring of 1999. This project has created two permanent, full-time construction and maintenance jobs, and one temporary job with the Park Authority. For more information on Cape Charles' Brownfields Pilot, contact Josie Matsinger at (215) 566-3132.