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Politics & Government

Stratford Gets $400,000 Brownfield Assessment Grant

The money will be used to determine which old industrial buildings in town are eligible for environmental cleanup assistance.

A $400,000 grant received this week from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will allow the town and a coalition of partnership agencies to identify brownfield properties in Stratford that are eligible for further cleanup assistance.

Chief of Staff Marc Dillon said for years, town officials have known of nearly 70 brownfield properties in Stratford. This Brownfields Assessment Grant will allow the town to take the first step toward cleaning them up.

Brownfields are former industrial sites that are under-utilized or unavailable for business development because of known or suspected pollution that might pose a health hazard.

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The cost of cleaning the pollution is often more than the property is worth, and often the owners disappear leaving them abandoned. Banks and towns tend not to foreclose on them because that would make them responsible for millions of dollars in environmental costs.

Dillon said the overall goal of the brownfield program is to get Stratford’s brownfield properties back on the tax rolls and generate new jobs again.

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Mayor John Harkins attended a press conference in Waterbury Wednesday when EPA officials announced the grants. Waterbury received $1 million, which was why the announcement was made there. Stratford was the only other town in the state to receive the grant.

"This grant will allow us to make assessments of these properties so we can move ahead with the process to start putting these vacant properties back on the tax rolls and help get Stratford residents back to work," Harkins said.

The assessment grant will pay for environmental specialists to survey the properties and document the levels of contamination on them.

Dillon noted the properties involved in this assessment are exclusive of the Army Engine Plant or the Raymark Superfund locations.

The grant application said the assessments would focus on two areas in town, the South End, which is near the airport and Lordship Boulevard, and the Transit-Centered Development Area (TCD area), defined as within a half-mile radius of the Metro-North train station in Stratford Center.

Approximately half of the grant would be spent on sites with hazardous waste and the other half on sites with underground petroleum waste.

The program will also include development of a brownfields redevelopment strategy for the South End and the TCD area that officials will include in the town’s Master Plan of Conservation and Development.

Dillon said the town recruited a number of community partner organizations to list on its grant application to show the EPA it had broad community support for the project.

Formal community partners on the project include the Stratford Chamber of Commerce, the , the Stratford Open Space Association, the South End Community Center, the Community Capital Fund, the Greater Bridgeport Regional Planning Agency and the Stratford Rotary Club.

The Stratford Community Fund will provide a grant for public education efforts to support the brownfields assessment project.

Dillon said as the assessment project proceeds, the role the community partner organizations will play would be determined.

"This project is underway and it is good to start it," Dillon said.

The first phase will be to survey the 70 or so properties according to the grant project’s assessment criteria to establish their eligibility for including them in the next grant.

If the project follows the process in other towns, such as Shelton, which has obtained several EPA brownfield grants for its downtown redevelopment program, future grants would fund environmental engineering work to determine what must be done to clean up the brownfield properties.

Dillon said according to his understanding, that is also the route the Stratford brownfield project would take.

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