[CPEO-BIF] Report on the Colorado Community Brownfields Workshop

[Lenny Siegel <lennysiegel@gmail.com>]

[The following report may be downloaded as a 2-page, 736 KB PDF file 
with photos from http://www.cpeo.org/pubs/CCBWreport.pdf.]

Report on the Colorado Community Brownfields Workshop

Lenny Siegel
Center for Public Environmental Oversight (CPEO)
September, 2007

About 30 people gathered in west Denver on Saturday, September 22, 2007 
for the Colorado Community Brownfields Workshop. Convened at the offices 
of Making Connections-Denver (MCD), the day-long workshop was 
co-sponsored by the Voluntary Cleanup Advisory Board (VCAB), MCD, the 
Front Range Economic Strategy Center (FRESC), and CPEO. Participants 
heard strong presentations from speakers from the U.S. EPA Region 8, the 
State of Colorado, and the regional Technical Assistance to Brownfields 
Communities program. But I was most impressed by the local talent: 
speakers from the local community.

Steve Harley of the VCAB provided maps and photos describing properties 
participating in Colorado's Voluntary Clean-Up Program. He is typical of 
a growing number of computer-savvy local activists who are adapting the 
full range of mapping resources and tools to understand environmental 
conditions in their communities. Steve established the workshop website, 
http://www.cocobrownfields.org, which will soon post the day's 
presentations as well as other emerging information about Colorado 
brownfields.

John Yelenick, a community activist and real estate professional, 
provided an innovative description of real estate covenants, from the 
perspective of residential real estate sellers, buyers, agents, and 
appraisers. If a property has underlying contamination from an off-site 
source, the property is legally encumbered. That is, there is a 
responsibility to notify. Usually one hears about real estate covenants 
from the perspective of polluters, developers, or regulators.

The next two community speakers described two strategies for ensuring 
that neighborhoods benefit from brownfields projects: ownership and 
leverage.

Local businessman Rogelio Rodriguez described the Osage Mercado, a 
cultural marketplace planned for three acres, with low levels of arsenic 
in the soil, adjacent to the 10th and Osage Light Rail Station. The city 
of Denver has received a $200,000 brownfields grant to address the 
property. The Osage Mercado coalition is a non-profit organization that 
hopes to obtain the site from the city and partner with a private 
developer. Rodriguez was only able to participate briefly in the 
workshop, because he was running the two-day open-air Osage Mercado 
festival on the site.

Robin Kniech of FRESC described how a community coalition, the Campaign 
for Responsible Development, negotiated a community benefits package 
with local government and one of the developers, Cherokee Denver, of the 
former Gates Rubber factory, located at another light rail station. 
Kniech described how the coalition conducted research, organized, 
lobbied, and negotiated for better jobs, more affordable housing, a more 
attractive, accessible development, and a more complete cleanup. She 
said the key to the community's success was its ability to approach 
local government and the developer with a single voice, not as distinct 
interest groups with conflicting priorities.

Finally, the VCAB's Tim Lopez - the driving force behind the workshop - 
explained how the VCAB leveraged access to environmental information, 
technical assistance, and persistent oversight to ensure a sound cleanup 
of not only the Gates property itself, but of impacted adjacent 
neighborhoods. He called upon the state of Colorado to institutionalize 
the community involvement process that has worked so well at the 
Gates-Cherokee voluntary cleanup site.

The workshop packed a lot of information into one workshop, but I 
believe that we laid the groundwork for additional community influence 
in both the development and cleanup of Denver-area brownfields.

--


Lenny Siegel
Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
c/o PSC, 278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org

_______________________________________________
Brownfields mailing list
Brownfields@list.cpeo.org
http://www.cpeo.org/mailman/listinfo/brownfields