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Remarks by Cliff Rothenstein
Wildlife Habitat Council's
Restoring Greenspace Conference
Merrillville, Indiana
September 16, 2003
It's a pleasure to be here. I know how hard it is putting on a conference like this and I am very impressed. Thank you Bill Howard, and thanks to all of your colleagues at the Wildlife Habitat Council. Your organization is providing a great service in helping to restore green space. You are especially helpful in bringing together people from different walks of life, from government, to industry, to environmental activists, challenging our worn out parochial views and forcing us think outside the box and find workable solutions.
I am sort of a "Johnny-come-lately" to the Wildlife Habitat Council. I was introduced to your Brownfields work only about a year and a half ago. So I'm still discovering the possibilities of working together. But I'm not new to Brownfields. I've been active in Brownfields for more than a decade. When I worked for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee I helped write and pass in the Senate the Voluntary Environmental Cleanup and Economic Development Act of 1993. It wasn't even called Brownfields back then but it included some of the same ideas that are now embodied in our new Brownfields law.
It took an entire decade to pass the new Brownfields law. But through hard work, good negotiating and a lot of luck we now have a new law. Your conference this year is especially timely because we are now in first year of implementing the nation's new Brownfields law. As you can imagine, we are facing countless challenges trying to make sense of new terminology, conflicting provisions and figure out what Congress really meant by "relatively low risk" sites. In fact some of the problems we are having date back to the 1993 bill, so, perhaps, I have only myself to blame.
Despite these implementation problems, they are minor compared to the huge new opportunity this new law brings. In fact, I like to think of our Brownfields opportunities and the challenges that lie ahead much like solving a jigsaw puzzle. It takes patience and persistence, but once it's finished it's very rewarding.
Each piece of our Brownfields puzzle represents a different task - from hiring a cleanup contractor, to developing a reuse plan, to finding a developer, to getting approval from local land use planners, to getting support from community leaders, to securing financing, to obtaining necessary permits, to resolving any liability disputes and to completing the job. To be successful we must put all of these pieces of the puzzle together. While this can be overwhelming, there's really only five easy pieces for solving the Brownfields puzzle, especially for abandoned gas stations.
First, when you think Brownfields grants think petroleum and apply for funding. For years, when most people pictured the Brownfields puzzle they pictured an old vacant, boarded up factory with some hazardous waste. Fortunately, now they also picture abandoned gas stations, perhaps our nation's greatest untapped redevelopment reservoir. Conservatively, there are 200,000 abandoned underground storage tanks at Brownfields sites.
So we welcome our nation's new Brownfields law. This new law gives us tools to begin to solve our puzzle, and begin to make a dent in cleaning up and reusing the 200,000 or more abandoned gas stations littering our nation. We are excited about the opportunities that the new Brownfields law gives us and so should you. For the first time we have a law that promotes the creation and preservation of parks and green space. And for the first time we have a law that specifically targets petroleum, earmarking 25 percent of the Brownfields grant funding for petroleum contaminated properties.
This money is significant. Before this law, we provided a total of $4.8 million for USTfields pilots. Three months ago, we announced $22.3 million for 102 new petroleum Brownfields grants. So in just the first year of the new Brownfields law we provided five times as much funding for petroleum Brownfields than we provided over the entire 20 year life of the UST program. In fact, the six states that make up EPA's Region 5, got 56 new Brownfields grants totaling almost $22 million, $5.5 million of which is for 31 petroleum Brownfields grants. This money is in addition to the funding provided to nine USTfields pilots already underway in Region 5.
We hope that this funding will help communities here in the Great Lakes region and all across the nation turn abandoned gas stations into new parks, wetlands, housing and retail establishments. The expectations are great and the possibilities are endless. We are already seeing some of the possibilities right here in Region 5. For example:
- Indianapolis, Indiana plans to cleanup abandoned gas stations in residential parts of the city and put new commercial, residential and green space in its place.
- Detroit, Michigan plans to target an Environmental Justice area, cleanup up the petroleum tanks and reuse the property for commercial and residential use.
- In Freeport, Illinois, the city plans to assess and cleanup several abandoned petroleum sites near a proposed river walk and recreational trail.
- And in Hammond, Indiana, which you can see after lunch on one of the field visits, the city is turning an old corner gas station into a pocket park.
This year's funding along with last year's USTfields grants is just the beginning. There will be petroleum Brownfields grants next year and for years to come. But grants alone are just one piece of the puzzle. If we are up to the challenge, we must put the other pieces of the Brownfields puzzle together.
So the second piece of the puzzle - when you dream about Brownfields redevelopment turn these dreams into everyday decisions. I'm reminded of my parents first new car, a 1951 green Plymouth Sedan, with a column stick shift and air conditioning that was installed by the dealer. As you can imagine, the air conditioning never worked well because it was simply bolted on to the engine. Today we drive in the comfort of factory installed air conditioning. It works well because it is integrated into the car design at the factory. It's no longer an after thought.
Just the same we must find ways to seamlessly and fully integrate Brownfields into our daily and routine decision making. We are beginning to do this by considering Brownfields early in our cleanup process. City planners are starting to think about Brownfields when they first consider their master plans and zoning decisions. Bankers and developers and some companies are beginning to factor Brownfields opportunities into their everyday business decisions. And the Wildlife Habitat Council is doing its part trying to get cities, companies and the public to think about ecological reuses of contaminated properties. Slowly but surely we are all making Brownfields a key part of decision making so it's no longer an after thought and no longer simply added on at the end of the day.
The third piece of the puzzle - when you talk about Brownfields success stories talk about reusing the abandoned gas station. The Northeast-Midwest Institute and National Association of Local Government Environmental Professionals issued a report "Recycling America's Gas Stations," which is a great resource for information on reusing petroleum contaminated property. If you haven't already done so, I encourage you to read it. It can be found at: http://www.nemw.org/recyclegas_stations.pdf (PDF) (110 pp, 3.1MB, About PDF) 
Another great place to learn more about petroleum Brownfields, especially how to turn old abandoned gas stations into new green space, is the Wildlife Habitat Council's web page. It can be found at: http://www.wildlifehc.org.
Both sites highlight example after example of success stories from cleaning up and reusing petroleum contaminated Brownfields properties. Most importantly, they recognize that the strong public and private partnerships, like our partnership with the Wildlife Habitat Council, provides the foundation for Brownfields success stories.
We all have our favorite story. One of my favorites is the West Ogden Avenue site in Chicago, which is now the West Ogden Avenue Triangle Park. This is an interesting site. It's located in a part of the city with minimal open/green space. It's small, about a tenth of an acre, and was used as a service station as early as 1919.
The site had plenty of challenges, environmental and otherwise. It contained a derelict building that was used for illegal dumping and other criminal activity. It had 11 buried storage tanks ranging in size from 600 to 10,000 gallons that contained gasoline, diesel, heating oil and used oil.
The city and others faced these challenges head on. The Chicago Department of Buildings, through their vacant building ordinance, covered the expenses associated with demolishing the derelict building, about $5,000. The Chicago Department of Environment, through their abandoned gas station program, paid over $150,000 to address the on site environmental issues, such as tank removal, site remediation and site access control. The Chicago Department of Transportation paid nearly $230,000 for site restoration and landscaping costs from their Federal Highway Administration and Illinois Department of Transportation funds.
As a result of these efforts restoration was completed in the Summer of 2001. Today the site is an attractive pocket park adding much needed green space to this part of the city. By putting all the pieces of the puzzle together, Chicago has its own success story. And it's a story that illustrates that reuse can take many different forms - including an urban pocket park.
I'm sure you have similar stories. We want to highlight them. We need your stories. Without them we can't make the best case for our Brownfields budget. And in these tight budget times it's even more important to make our best case. Things are getting so fiscally tight, some are asking us to choose between the environment or the economy. But when it comes to Brownfields, the environment and the economy go together like peanut butter and jelly - cleaning up the environment provides a real boost to the economy.
With so many sites across the country the economic potential from Brownfields cleanup and redevelopment is huge. According to a recent U.S. Conference of Mayor's survey, Brownfields cleanup in 148 cities across the country may generate $1.9 billion in annual revenue and create over 500,000 new jobs. It can be found at: http://www.usmayors.org/71stAnnualMeeting/brownfields_060903.asp
There's more. For every acre of Brownfields redeveloped we save over four acres of green space. You may be asking, how can that be? Well, according to a study done for EPA's Brownfields office, if a developer was to build an office or homes on pristine land, it would take four times as much land than building it on a Brownfields site to accommodate parking, buffer zones, landscaping and other infrastructure. The study can be found at: http://www.gwu.edu/~eem/Brownfields/project_report/report.htm
With an estimated 95,000 acres of Brownfields available for redevelopment, by building new projects on old Brownfields sites, there is the potential to save almost a half million acres of green space. That's a lot of green space that can be saved - almost as large as Yosemite National Park or twice the size of Chicago.
So please help us identify what you did to turn a once abandoned gas station into a new coffee shop, park or home. Who were your partners? How much did you spend? How much did you leverage? How many jobs did you create? How much has the property value increased? How much green space did you create or save? This and other information really helps to tell and sell the whole story.
The fourth piece of the puzzle - when you think of petroleum Brownfields think about creating new or expanding old public/private partnerships. Our goal is to increase opportunities to cleanup and reuse petroleum contaminated Brownfields properties. Establishing strong partnerships has been one of the most tried and true ways for addressing traditional Brownfields. We want to build on these partnerships for the newly defined Brownfields universe, petroleum sites. We want to create partnerships so we can bring together the public and private entities that own the contaminated property with the public and private end-users who may want to utilize the property.
I ask you to work with us and reach out to end users, developers, property owners, lenders, non-profits, community groups and others who are interested in establishing a partnership to promote the cleanup of petroleum Brownfields properties and stimulate the reuse of these properties. We want to start by establishing partnerships to promote four different types of reuse scenarios - residential, retail/commercial, public, and ecological/recreational.
- Residential Reuse: We are working with Housing and Urban Development, Habitat for Humanity and others to develop an expanded partnership to further promote reuse of abandoned gas stations for new housing. In Oakland, CA, for example, an abandoned gas station is being turned into mixed use housing and commercial space.
- Retail/Commercial Reuse: We are encouraging more companies to do what Ben and Jerry's, CVS, Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks have already done - to locate some of their new stores on old abandoned gas stations and other Brownfields properties.
- Public Reuse: We are also working with several cities under our USTfields pilots to help promote public reuse. In Trenton, New Jersey the city is building a new firehouse on an old abandoned gas station site. We want to expand this idea to other cities and help them turn abandoned gas stations into new maintenance yards, police substations or public health clinics.
- Ecological/Recreational Reuse: Finally, I'm delighted that we have already established a partnership with the Wildlife Habitat Council to help maximize the ecological benefits of reuse. Through this partnership we are beginning to bring together key players in industry and cities, to turn vacant gas stations into parks, wetlands and other recreational uses. We are well on our way toward making this happen.
So when you think of what you can do to promote cleanup and reuse of abandoned gas stations, think about joining us in these and other partnerships. You can learn more about these partnerships on our web site. (http://www.epa.gov/oust/ustfield).
The fifth and final piece of the puzzle - when you think about Brownfields think about including petroleum issues in more conferences like this one. In an effort to advance our understanding of petroleum Brownfields, we plan to host a number of roundtable discussions around the country during the next year.
Our goal is to bring together public and private entities interested in reusing abandoned gas stations. We need experts from states, cities, business and public interest groups to share information with your counterparts who are just getting on board the Brownfields train. We hope that these roundtable discussions will help spread the word. We will let you know about the details of any roundtable discussions that we schedule and invite you to participate.
Similarly, we need to host more conferences like this one and make sure that petroleum is a key part of the agenda. One of the best conferences on the horizon is the national Brownfields conference. This year it will be held in Portland, Oregon, on October 27th through 29th. The theme for this year's conference is "Growing a Greener America" and it will include sessions on petroleum Brownfields. You can find information about this conference on EPA's Brownfields web site. (http://www.epa.gov/brownfields/bfconf.htm) I would encourage you to attend.
In closing, we have a great opportunity and for the first time we have resources to go with it. By putting together the five easy pieces of our puzzle: (1) applying for Brownfields grants; (2) turning redevelopment dreams into daily decisions; (3) talking about success stories; (4) building stronger partnerships; and (5) hosting more petroleum Brownfields conferences - we can turn more abandoned gas stations into success stories for neighborhoods all across the country.