A federal grant will help local governments investigate what type of underground contamination may be present in old, under-used commercial properties.
The Environmental Protection Agency recently awarded $750,000 to the Valley Council of Governments. VCOG serves local towns, including Ansonia, Derby, Seymour and Shelton — former factory towns each with their fair share of contaminated properties.
Most of the money to be used to determine what kind of environmental problems exist on such questionable sites: the EPA awarded $400,000 to VCOG in grants for assessing questionable properties, and $350,000 to help clean them up.
Rick Dunne, VCOG’s executive director, estimated the $400,000 portion would allow for investigations of about a half-dozen sites.
“This is to define the problem on the sites,” he said of the $400,000 award. “We have a number of sites that need assessment.”
Dunne said VCOG will be sending solicitations to Valley officials soon to see if they know of potential sites. In order for the money to be used, Dunne said, a developer must be interested in redeveloping such a property.
One of the properties VCOG listed on its grant application, Dunne said, is the former site of Healey Ford auto dealership in Ansonia, which shuttered in 2010.
Dunne said recently he was waiting for input from the city about that site, which has been attracting interest from developers since 2010.
In a region with an industrial history as rich as the Valley’s, vacant industrial properties are sadly commonplace. Officials hope the federal dollars announced last month will continue to help such sites see new life.
In Shelton, for instance, officials see potential for the funds at sites downtown, along Canal Street. A string of properties there have been re-purposed from industrial uses, and developers continue to propose new projects.
James Ryan, the president of the Shelton Economic Development Corporation, mentioned the Chromium Process building — which the city has been eying — and properties formerly used by Axton Cross and Cel-Lastik as possibilities.
“It’s a golden opportunity not only for Shelton but for all the other towns to look at opportunities to take these sites back,” Ryan said.
When a developer is looking to redevelop an old property, their plans might be hampered if there’s a history of hazardous materials at the site.
They don’t want to spend the money to buy a property it will be cost-prohibitive to develop.
And they don’t want to pay the whole cost of finding out, either.
That’s where federal assessment grants come in.
A developer looking to remediate a site would pay for 20 percent of the cost to assess any contamination, according to Dunne, with the grant picking up the rest of the tab.
The information is key for decision-makers to address when developing a property, Ryan said.
“The assessment gives you the ammunition and the facts to tell you how you should approach it, and what your cost is going to be,” he said. “They’re really what help you launch your clean-up activities.”
Dunne said the goal of the program is to equalize the cost of remediating a brownfield site and developing never-developed property.
Doing just that makes most potentially contaminated sites instantly more desirable to developers, usually because they’re already in prime spots.
“For the most part, they are really well-located in terms of infrastructure,” he said. “To have the money available to do site investigations is just so important.”
Dunne said the EPA stipulated that half the money be used on assessing sites with possible contamination by hazardous materials and half on sites with potential petroleum contamination.
The new money is part of $3.5 million in awards statewide announced by the EPA.
