NEW YORK CITY-The Bloomberg administration on Monday launched a program to award grants intended to help offset the costs of studying and beginning to clean up brownfield sites. It will make more than $9 million in small grants available to community-based organizations over the next several years, the administration says.
Known as the Mayor’s Office of Environmental Remediation’s Brownfield Incentive Grant program, the initiative is said to be the first in a series of new programs targeted at environmentally contaminated sites. Each of those programs “will help landowners and developers clean up contaminated properties and bring them back into productive use,” Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith said in a speech before the New York City Brownfield Partnership.
The BIG program will be administered by the Office of Environmental Remediation, established by Mayor Michael Bloomberg two years ago to implement the brownfield goals of PlaNYC. Bloomberg had unveiled the PlanNYC series of environmental initiatives on Earth Day in 2007.
According to the OER, among the principles guiding PlaNYC was that the city needed to act independently to accelerate its brownfield cleanup and redevelopment goals and prepare for its infrastructure needs over the next several decades. PlaNYC thus identified 11 major brownfield initiatives to put New York City in a position to achieve these goals.
“Historically, brownfields have been managed exclusively by states,” says Andrea Kretchmer, chair of the board of directors of the Brownfield Partnership, in a statement. “It is great to see New York City become the first city to take an advanced leadership role in this important issue.”
In a client advisory last month, law firm Carter Ledyard & Milburn LLP noted that the OER had finalized regulations creating a new local brownfield cleanup program. “Owners of seriously contaminated and undeveloped sites may still want to take advantage of the state’s Brownfield Cleanup Program because of its extensive state tax credits,” wrote attorneys Christopher Rizzo and Coleen Fazio. “The state’s Brownfield Cleanup Program also offers stronger liability protection than the city’s program because such liability releases are specifically authorized by state statute. But the city and state are reportedly working on an agreement to provide some recognition of the program by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which should honor the city’s liability releases.”
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Paul Bubny
Paul Bubny is managing editor of Real Estate Forum and GlobeSt.com. He has been reporting on business since 1988 and on commercial real estate since 2007. He is based at ALM Real Estate Media Group's offices in New York City.
