Cambria, Portage part of growing interest for cleanup grants

By Matthew Call, Daily Register

Two Columbia County communities are part of a recent surge of interest in using state grants to clean up abandoned and seized property with contamination issues.

Portage and Cambria both recently were approved for brownfield site assessment grants to be used on potentially contaminated sites both communities recently took hold of.

"More and more people are having properties get to the point where they can use this money," said Darsi Foss, chief of the Brownfields and Outreach Section Bureau for Remediation and Redevelopment of the state Department of Natural Resources. "Local governments are feeling more and more comfortable."

Brownfield grants are state-funded and were born out of a group formed to help the Legislature with public policy. The grants, which come from a $1.7 million annual allotment, are for local governments to use on sites without a clear contaminator.

Brownfield grants target a specific occurrence in which a property could be contaminated and a potential buyer bypasses it due to the extra cost of analysis, Foss said. Local governments, the only entity to which the grants are available, can partner with a private owner or go out on their own to get a grant and study what environmental problems exist on a site.

Typical sites are tanneries in which a company has been legally dissolved or defunct mom-and-pop dry cleaners against which a community doesn't have a legal recourse to force cleanup.

Portage will use a $55,000 grant to demolish two buildings of an old plastics plant off Silver Lake Drive near the city's airport, property the city came to own in a settlement of contamination and delinquent taxes. The money will be used to remediate asbestos in the building during demolition.

Cambria condemned a former Masonic lodge on West Edgewater Street in the village and is using a $25,250 grant to demolish that building and study the ground underneath it to see if a fuel tank is located there.

The Cambria building is next to the village's fire station, near which a buried fuel storage tank was found. Village officials think a storage tank could be beneath the Masonic building.

The village wants in the short-term to turn the property into extra parking for the fire department.

"Right now, they really don't have much parking," village clerk Lois Frank said.

The emblematic brownfield site is one in which the potential for needed environmental cleanup causes buyers to look elsewhere.

"We've had that scenario, because nobody wants to spend $25,000 on a property they're not going to buy," Foss said.

Portage is looking to market the former plastics site for redevelopment. To do so, it has to raze the buildings and remediate the asbestos in them. Brownfield grants involving asbestos are available only for buildings that are going to be demolished, Foss said, and have the potential to release harmful particles into the soil.

"In order to tear down the building, you have to remove the asbestos," said Portage City Administrator Larry Plaster.

Plaster said the project could be the first time the city has used a brownfield grant, and that state funding is key to getting some projects off the ground.

"We seek to use external sources of funding whenever we can," Plaster said.

The city's recently renewed community development authority targeted future brownfield grants as a possible tool for jump-starting development in the city.

Robert Roth of General Engineering in Portage, who worked with Cambria on writing the village's brownfield application, said municipalities are trying to use the grants if they fit into the program's criteria.

"There are some sites that are better than others … old gas stations are the classic example," Roth said. "Sometimes you have to apply and see where you stand."

mcall@capitalnewspapers.com

745-3510