Money is good, you like it, I like it. More is usually better, right, Well, on this episode of Parts per Billion, we present you with a scenario where more money isn't necessarily better, at least not for rural communities that want to redevelop polluted real estate. Hello and welcome to another episode of Parts per Billion, the policy podcast from Bloomberg Environment. As always, I'm your host, David Schultz.
So we've talked on the podcast before about some of the challenges of redeveloping contaminated real estate, and not every developer is willing to step in and purchase a property that might have previously been the dumping ground for lord only knows what kind of toxic chemicals. The EPA gives out grants that act as a sort of carrot to help developers get over their fears, and recently it announced it would be increasing the size of these grants, which
is great news, right. Well, Sylvia Carridan says, no, not really, and she joins us in the studio now to explain why. Hello Sylvia, Hi David, thanks for having me, Thank you for coming. So first off, these grants are for what are known as brown fields, and we should sort of define what that is. I'm guessing it's not just a field of dying grass that's turned brown. It could be well, yeah, I guess it depends on why the grass is dying.
That's right. So brown fields are sort of an interesting creature because you can say that something is a brown feel just based on the perception of contamination there. Maybe it's not even contaminated, but people think it is. It can also be a property that was abandoned. It can be just something that's been vacant for a long time. But in general it is underutilized real estate, so it
has the potential for redevelopment. So it's just land that is for maybe an environmental reason or maybe a reason that's tangential to the environment, just not being used for what it could be, right, I see, And give me an example of the kinds of pollution that can be found on these sites, you know, are we talking like? You know? I think one of the things we talked about before was like a dry cleaner that existed for a while and closed down, you know, leaves all kinds
of weird dry cleaning chemicals on a site. Is that so that's a brown field, that's right? That could be a brown field that it could also be a gas station that had closed down, and maybe there are some underground tanks that are leaking whatever kinds of things, maybe petroleum products, maybe something else. It could be a factory that closed down after you know, all the workers got outsourced to foreign countries, and who knows what is left behind,
Maybe just the building, maybe there's something else. Are we talking like radioactive chemicals? Are we talking chemicals where like if you come into contact with like one molecule, you'll drop dead, Like what kind of you know? Give me example. So brown fields are not usually as contamina as superfund sites, which the EPA says is the most contamining sites in the country. Those are things like the Goanis Canal with
its layer of black manis at the bottom. Can we have one podcast with you on where you don't talk about black mannaise? Every time you come on, you bring up it's a great black mannaise in the it's a great mental picture. It is a mental picture. I don't
know if i'd say it's great, but so okay. So I think I'm getting the idea that these these are not insanely polluted, but they're too polluted to do something with and the EPA wants to give out these grants to you know, make sure that that they can be
restored and economically useful. Yeah, So developers would generally redevelop that land if they wanted to, but for some reason, you know, maybe there's the potential for contamination or something else that makes them hesitate, and that's why the federal government steps in to try to close that gap between what would be a reasonable investment and sort of what might be happening at that site. So the grants that the giving out are getting larger. They're saying, you know, where,
you want to help redevelop larger sites. And that's a good thing, right you would think it is. So the upper limit for clean up grants EPA can award to individual brown field sites went up from two hundred thousand dollars to five hundred thousand dollars as a result of some brownfield provisions included in the Omnibous Spending Bill from this past spring. So you can now get up to half a million dollars to redevelop one of these sites.
That's right. And there's now a new category of multipurpose brown fields grants that are up to one million dollars each. But yeah, why why is this bad? Why why are you know people saying this is going to hurt you know, small rural communities. So EPA is using the same amount of money that it usually has for brownfields grants, which means that if they are giving out larger grants, there's
going to be fewer of them. If you are a community that's been applying for these grants every single year, like Milwaukee, and you're used to the pros, you know what the EPA is looking for, you're more likely to be one of the forerunners to get that grant, as opposed to a community that hasn't really been in the grant writing process before. They're not really familiar with applications and maybe they just have, you know, a gas station
to clean up. They're less likely to get one of those grants because there's so much competition for the bigger ones. I see. So it's essentially the slices of the pie are getting larger, but the actual size of the pot, the whole pie, is staying the same, right right, So it sounds like this is a situation where they're rich are getting richer and the poor essentially are staying just
as poor as they were. I mean, it's that the ultimate effect that you have these big cities with that have more resources and you know, maybe attorneys on staff who can help them write these grants and help them maybe also lobby the EPA to get these grants. Are you know, getting are more eligible for these larger grants,
whereas you know, a smaller community just doesn't have a chance. Yeah, so the rural communities out there that have fewer resources, maybe less experienced with these grants, are less likely to get them. But the EPA also funds these organizations that assist communities like those for free, so they do have
the option to reach out and ask for help. So there is some hope for them, right, There is some hope, but it's not a guarantee that they're going to get those big grants as opposed to a city that maybe has an entire industrial district that's been abandoned and needs to be redeveloped. Let's take a step back and think about the optics of this. I hate that term optics, but let's just sort of throw it out there. This would seem like this is this new policy is something
that helps urban areas and hurts rural areas. That's not something that I'm used to hearing about from this EPA, from the Trump administration's EPA. What's going on here? Why did they take this move that would seem to fall out of line with their sort of political mo So I think these changes in the omnimus build to how big the grants can be came from lobbyists who are familiar with this issue and are representing these communities who
have paid for that help. Sure, that's how things work here, right, and also groups like the National League of Cities who are sort of wider reaching. And if you're not communicating with those groups, or you don't have a lobbyist to represent you, you're less likely to get your interests hurt in Congress. So that's why those changes are making their way into not only these bills, but also the EPA's programs.
I see. So it's sort of this was slipped under the radar, and maybe you know, it's not a political thing. It's just some very successful lobbyists for big cities were able to, you know, get something into the appropriations bill without people noticing. I think it was public the whole time, but I think they're very happy about what they were able to get into into the bill. All right, well, thank you Sylvia for educating us about Brownfield's redevelopment. That
was Sylvia Kerrignan. For more of her reporting on solid waste and other top like this, visit our website at News dot Bloomberg, Environment dot com. That's news dot Bloomberg, Environment dot com. Today's episode of Press Pavillion was produced by myself as well as Jessica Coombs and Rachel Dagel. Our editor is Marissa Horn, and our audio engineer is Nicholas and Zelado. The music for this episode is a message by Jizarre, who was used under a Creative Commons license.
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