Alabama Brownfields Conference: Rebuilding Alabama Brick by Brick

A Brownfield Site - Photo by Danny Smith

I attended the annual Alabama brownfields conference on August 10, 2017 in Prattville, Alabama. It was well attended with great presentations from private and government speakers including Alabama Secretary of Commerce Greg Canfield who demonstrated the role that brownfield redevelopment can play in the economic development of Alabama. Similar things are also happening in Mississippi – I wrote a successful brownfield grant for the Mississippi East Central Planning and Development District that was recently awarded $299,700 by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

In case you missed the conference, I have summarized my own significant observations below.

Sonja Favors leads the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) Redevelopment Section and she described some of the brownfield redevelopment services, incentives, and assistance that is available from ADEM.

Visioning: Instead of simply creating a portfolio of commercial and industrial sites that might draw the attention of a potential developer or new business, Sonja encourages local governments to create a vision of how specific sites could be redeveloped. ADEM can help municipalities explore redevelopment possibilities and generate conceptual sketches of those ideas that can be used strategically to focus on desired outcomes. A conceptual plan provides a visual dream of what might occur in a community that can be difficult to convey with words alone.

Site Assessments: ADEM can provide municipalities with phase 1 site assessments to identify potential environmental site conditions. ADEM also has limited funds to assist municipalities with phase 2 site assessments to characterize soil and groundwater contamination on a site. The municipality does not have to own the site, but must have site access permission.

Revolving Loan Fund: Low interest rate loans are available to help local governments redevelop brownfield sites. She described examples where interest rates were 2% on loan amounts ranging from $200,000 to $1,200,000. While these loans are only available from ADEM to local governments, there can be opportunities to assist private developers indirectly through local government.

Alabama’s Brownfield Voluntary Clean-up Program (VCP): The benefits of this program include future cleanup liability protection for the buyer or developer as well as tax credits. Under ADEM’s VCP site remedial end-points can be established based upon risk with environmental covenants to restrict site use. Sonja reminded everyone that environmental covenants can be modified by ADEM as needed to address future site conditions. ADEM is available to assist with issues of this type.

Corey Holmes provided an overview of ADEM’s waste disposal approval process. It is now possible to characterize waste streams in-situ. While ex-situ characterization is preferred, where waste stream samples are collected and analyzed after they are excavated from a site, in situ characterization uses soil samples that are collected before excavating the soil. In situ characterization can save a lot of time and money when brownfield sites are being cleaned up for reuse because expensive onsite storage and laboratory testing and approval delays can be eliminated to allow you to simply excavate and haul the material to an approved disposal facility in a faster manner.

Elizabeth Limbrick of the New Jersey Institute of Technology provided an overview of EPA’s Technical Assistance to Brownfields (TAB) program that provides free technical brownfield assistance to local communities. Under this program technical assistance is available to help assess and cleanup brownfield sites. They are available review draft brownfield grant applications and provide copies of successful grant applications for reference. See: https://www.njit.edu/tab/technical-assistance-brownfield-communities-program-njit-tab/

Louis Cardinal with Thornton Farish in Montgomery, Alabama provided an overview of federal New Market Tax Credits (NMTC) that provide an incentive for brownfield site redevelopment. The NMTC program is administered by the Community Development Financial Institute under the U.S. Department of Treasury. He demonstrated that Alabama is an underserved market for NMTC funding. Applications for NMTC funding are highly competitive. There are certain criteria associated with this site redevelopment incentive that is focused on areas of high poverty and projects that create jobs.

Finally, Leslie Sykes of Cardno shared some of her tips for writing a successful EPA brownfield grant application.

·      Start the grant writing process early! She does not typically start on one within two months of the grant application deadline.

·      Get the assistance you need to obtain the data required to write the grant application.

·      Read and study successful grant applications rather than re-invent the wheel yourself on how to structure and write your application.

·      Make sure that all the community letters of support specifically demonstrate how the organization will aid or support the applicant’s redevelopment project(s). Obtain those support letters early in the process.

·      A great grant starts with a great story! You should write Section #2, the Project Description, first that described what you intend to accomplish with the grant. Everything else in the application should tie into and build upon this story.

·      If you identify community needs in your application, make sure that you demonstrate how you will use the grant funding to address those needs.

·      The grant applications have length and font limitations; therefore, use the allotted space wisely. Try to allocate space as a percentage of the overall scoring matrix for each section of the application.

·      Read and carefully review the draft many times yourself and using other people; however, having “too many cooks in the kitchen” in developing the overall theme and flow of the application can also be a problem.

·      Verify that the applicant’s login codes and login expirations will be valid when it comes time to upload the application before the deadline. If you cannot upload the application documents before the deadline, all your work will be wasted. Login credentials can require significant time to obtain.

Let’s redevelop Alabama together!

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