[CPEO-BIF] Grant program to target brownfield sites in historically underserved neighborhoods in Minneapolis and St. Paul., Minnesota

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

MPCA plans to boost cleanup efforts in historically underserved neighborhoods with grant program


By Kristoffer Tigue 
MinnPost (MN)
June 22, 2017


The MPCA is boosting efforts with a $300,000 federal grant that they’ll use to target brownfield sites in historically underserved neighborhoods in Minneapolis and St. Paul. 
When Project for Pride in Living (PPL) considered building an affordable housing complex on a site in north Minneapolis that once housed a dry cleaner, they figured they might run into some problems with the property. “We discovered there was some arsenic in the soil and ... a soil gas, which is hazardous if you breathe it in,” said Abbie Loosen, a project manager for PPL.

The process of evaluating the site, which included background checks on the property and sampling the soil, ran PPL roughly $20,000, and that didn’t involve the actual cleanup process. Luckily, PPL was able to tap into a Hennepin County grant pool that enables developers to investigate old properties for potential environmental hazards without having to spend their own money. 

The idea is to incentivize companies to redevelop old, unused industrial lots — also known as brownfields — that may be too toxic for redevelopment as is by taking away some of cost burden. And for years, the county and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) has been divvying out hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to developers, like PPL, to do just that.


…

For the entire article, see
https://www.minnpost.com/community-sketchbook/2017/06/mpca-plans-boost-cleanup-efforts-historically-underserved-neighborhoods

--

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650/961-8918 
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org

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