More than $300 million in grant awards have been released from the Environmental Protection Agency for a sweeping effort to clean up dozens of brownfields sites nationally.
The funding is part of a larger effort on the part of the agency, according to Michael Regan, EPA Administrator, to “clean up contaminated properties in overburdened communities and bring them back into productive use.”
The grants are focusing on some 200 sites and represent the latest funding commitment for a program that was originally launched by the EPA in 1995, tasked with cleaning up tens of thousands of abandoned and toxic industrial sites in both urban and rural neighborhoods.
According to data gathered by the agency, communities of color have been the most impacted by the ongoing existence of brownfields sites, with twice as many black as white Americans living within a half a mile range of such properties. That same data also indicated that roughly 10% of all Hispanic Americans live within that same range.
The new funding is seeing $231 million going to the Brownfields Multipurpose, Assessment, and Cleanup Grants Program; along with $68 million targeting what is called the Revolving Loan Fund; and another $3 million for EPA-sponsored technical assistance efforts.
Regan, the former secretary of North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality, has long been an advocate for cleaning up brownfields with the goal of using such properties for economic development.
In 2021, upon the announcement of $66 million in EPA brownfields funding, he remarked to an Associated Press reporter that “environmental protection and economic prosperity are not mutually exclusive, but they go hand in hand.”
In this most recent round of funding, six Colorado communities are receiving more than $8 million in funding to clean up one-time industrial sites, with the town of Kersey securing $1.1 million to clean up the site of an abandoned grain elevator.
Some $500,000 in funding has additionally been secured for the assessment and clean-up of brownfield sites in Raton, New Mexico; while Arizona has received nearly $2 million for assessment and clean-up work in Flagstaff, Kingman, Munds Park, Prescott, Tucson, Show Low, and Winslow.
By Garry Boulard