Brownfield Redevelopment Working in California Cities

Many cities are running out of clean developable land. A number of California have taken this bull by the horns. Here are four case examples you might want to read about.

Emeryville Transforms Community

Sandwiched between Oakland and Berkeley along the San Francisco Bay waterfront, the City of Emeryville has become a national model for brownfields redevelopment. The city, approximately one square mile in size, was created by industrialists at the turn of the last century. Through the 1960s, Emeryville bustled with manufacturing and industry. It was home to a tannery, a recycling facility where used chemical drums were dumped out and washed, a sugar manufacturing plant, and pesticide and pigment factories. During the 1970s, the area’s manufacturing and light industrial facilities began to lose their competitive edge, and many moved overseas or to other states as part of cost-cutting measures. Vacant industrial sites sat disused; the city’s former vitality diminished.

In the early 1980s, city leaders launched a concerted effort to revitalize their mostly abandoned and dilapidated community. With a visionary and united city council, an aggressive redevelopment agency and a good location, the city began redeveloping its brownfields. Emeryville took advantage of all available resources, including federal funds, and entered into agreements with state regulatory agencies to secure local authority over certain cleanups. The city was the first to aggressively use the Polanco Redevelopment Act (see “Brownfields Re-development Tools for California Cities”) to recover cleanup costs from the original polluters.

To date, the city has constructed more than 500 housing units — nearly half of them for low- or moderate-income residents. Due to redevelopment, the city estimates that during the next 20 years, it will add an additional 8,400 jobs. Emeryville expects to benefit from new development, with an annual tax increment of $5.4 million to go toward municipal infrastructure, housing, community services and redevelopment assistance.

San Diego Hits a Home Run

The City of San Diego’s ballpark redevelopment project is one of the best examples of the city’s success in brownfields redevelopment. Located in an area that was once troubled and environmentally impacted, the ballpark area is now in the process of becoming a vibrant, safe, economically sustainable community-supported neighborhood. This success was achieved through partnerships between Centre City Development Corporation (CCDC) and a team of municipal, legal and environmental consultants who worked with the community, property owners and a regulatory agency to clean up and develop the ballpark site.

The project began in the spring of 1998 and was completed in record time in 2000. An assessment of the area documented a history of contamination be-ginning in the late 1800s. More than 100 underground storage tanks were found, along with contaminants such as dissolved lead, gasoline, diesel fuel, burn ash and waste petroleum products. CCDC and the stakeholders collaborated on a master workplan to guide the process of further assessment, cleanup and redevelopment. Remediation included removing the affected soil and groundwater, implementing innovative storm water management strategies and runoff conveyance measures, and incorporating swales and other filtration devices in the ballpark design.

The final plan for the area includes not only the ballpark but also a “park within a park,” thousands of new homes, office space, hotels, retail outlets, parking, a new library branch, schools and public transportation infrastructure.

In addition to using the Polanco Redevelopment Act for one of the most ambitious redevelopment projects in California, San Diego was also the first city in the state to adopt a city ordinance to use the new brownfield cleanup tools included in Senate Bill (SB) 32, the California Land Environmental Restoration and Reuse Act (Escutia-Chapter 764, Statutes of 2001). SB 32 further expands the power of municipalities to address and cleanup contaminated sites (see “Brownfields Redevelopment Tools for California Cities”).

Gardena Targets Distressed Areas

The City of Gardena is located in the southwest area of Los Angeles County, with an ethnically diverse population of roughly 59,000. In 2002, the city received a grant from a U.S. EPA demonstration pilot program to assess and evaluate targeted brownfield sites in the community. The city’s Brownfields Pilot Project identified 47 brownfields in the area and targeted four as immediate priorities for redevelopment.

Using the EPA grant, the city assessed sites located along major transportation routes in distressed neighborhoods on its northern side. The original pilot project has completed six environmental assessments of brownfields in this area of the city, including abandoned retail sites, a waste disposal sump site and sites with known industrial contaminants. Two additional assessments and development of a cleanup design at another site are under way. The city is in the process of acquiring one of the two sites and reusing it as a transit center.

Stockton’s Waterfront Gets a Makeover

The City of Stockton first entered the brownfields arena in 1996, when it was awarded funding from the U.S. EPA for a brownfields pilot program. The work completed under this pilot project provided a learning curve for the city on how best to tackle brownfields redevelopment along the historic downtown waterfront. Until site assessments were completed on both the south and north shores, the city had presumed that historic development patterns had significantly contaminated the lands abutting the waterfront. After assessment, however, all of the areas except one proved to be only lightly contaminated and economically feasible to clean up for future redevelopment. This knowledge has influenced the city’s current redevelopment efforts to concentrate entertainment, recreational, retail and residential development at this location, turning the waterfront into a highly desirable amenity.

With this comprehensive knowledge of its brownfields, Stockton is now moving forward with the cleanup and redevelopment of properties owned by the redevelopment agency. The city has applied the lessons learned from the pilot program, as well as the more elaborate clean-up assessments and plans required by the state. As a result, the city has become a proactive participant in getting properties cleaned up and back into productive reuse.

The city has also made significant progress on CCLR’s supplemental brownfields program with the EPA. The most exciting outcome of this is an innovative pilot program being prepared in cooperation with the California State Department of Toxic Control Substances and the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board. Upon completion, the city will establish regional background levels for specified contaminants of concern, thus streamlining the cleanup of waterfront properties, both privately and publicly owned.

Source: California League of Cities