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Trumbull County Brownfield Sites Await Productive Reuse
GIRARD, Ohio -- The old Girard Leatherworks property, ialong the highly trafficked Route 422 corridor, is the “perfect example” of a brownfield site that has high development potential, Sarah Lown says.
It’s also been “a thorn in the side of everybody in Trumbull County” since the early 1990s and “is hindering the complexion of the main drag there,” she remarks.
Leatherworks is one of several properties in Trumbull County – brownfields and others in need of improvement – that are potential candidates for development. It is also one of the prospective sites for Phase 1 and Phase 2 environmental assessments covered under a grant awarded for an effort the port authority led.
“It’s got rail service. It flanks the river. You could do some economic development,” says Lown, senior economic development manager of the Western Reserve Port Authority. “You could also do some public use like a park or a trail or something along those lines.”
In May 2013, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency awarded a $600,000 Brownfield Assessment Grant to the port authority on behalf of the Trumbull Brownfield Coalition. In the coalition are the Trumbull County Planning Commission, the city of Warren, Howland Township and the Mahoning River Corridor Initiative.
“This came because Trumbull County had seen lots of closures and layoffs between Delphi and RG Steel and so forth [resulting in] a lot of mothballed former properties,” says Lown, who is acting as project manager for the brownfield coalition. Lown worked on brownfield redevelopment for the city of Youngstown before she joined the port authority staff. That brownfield development included property eventually used for Vallourec’s $1 billion pipe mill.
In some cases, remediated sites still wait for projects, so the Trumbull County effort is aimed at identifying properties that have “a clear end use plan of some kind,” she says.
“These are properties that they have the infrastructure available,” adds Trish Nuskievicz, executive director of the Trumbull County Planning Commission.
The primary focus is the “Golden Triangle” in the northeastern corner of Howland Township, Lown says. “The reason for that is it’s one of the primary employment centers of Warren and Howland. It straddles both those communities. It’s got rail access and it’s within a half a mile of Route 82.”
A list of about 50 sites that Lown says can be construed as brownfields has been narrowed to 10 that have some development potential. Among them are two publicly owned sites – Warren’s community development building and the Wean Building. Trumbull County owns the latter where simple asbestos assessments can be performed. “It gives you enough information to know whether you should demolish it, renovate it, those kinds of things,” she says. “So those are smaller ones that we can do with immediate rewards.”
“We have these old buildings and we need to do something with them,” remarks Mike Keys, Warren community development director. Once the asbestos abatements are completed in the city community development building and the county-owned Wean property, potential buyers will know their statuses if they’re left standing. Should they be razed, the asbestos studies would already be done, saving the city some money.
Once sites are assessed, the need remains for funds to pay for any remediation required before they can be returned to productive use. The port authority has applied for $1 million from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to establish a revolving loan fund that would be used to finance site cleanup work.
One challenge is building the market for the sites once they have undergone remediation, Lown concedes.
“The other thing I hope to do better is more comprehensive education and outreach on why it’s important to clean up these industrial sites and why it’s important to keep your employment centers in the cities, in the urban core, that sort of thing,” she continues.
Nearly all of the sites have more ready access to rail and highway than would be found in the suburbs.
“A lot of these properties are found in the urban core so by redeveloping them, you’re refocusing jobs on the urban centers, which can reduce sprawl and protect farmland. All of these issues end up being connected,” says Trumbull Planning’s Nuskievicz.
“There are an abundance of properties available along the [Mahoning River] corridor,” Nuskievicz adds. Beginning in Newton Falls at the old Rockwell plant and moving down the river, “You end up crossing Copperweld [Steel] and you go down a little further and you have [Mahoningside],” she reports. “You continue down the river corridor and you will run into one after another of those abandoned properties.”
The former Mahoningside power plant was remediated for redevelopment in 2012.
“The city wanted to get that done first because it was such an eyesore,” Keys says, and there was the possibility of contaminants leaching into other areas. “The result of that cleanup is we now have 6½ acres of clean site,” he says. “It’s a big grass field that’s now available for development.”
The Mahoningside site is being marketed for development and the city has received some “minor interest,” he reports. Additionally, officials are considering a possible municipal purpose for the property.
“Also, because of the location” – near City Hall, highly visible and in a residential area – “we want to be careful what goes there,” Keys adds.
City officials have conducted several meetings on the five acres it owns in the area known as “the peninsula.” The city is looking at conducting a marketing study and “putting some numbers together that would help us attract a developer for that,” Keys says. And the city has two industrial parks where land is available for development.
The Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber has available about a third of the 120 acres it acquired a decade ago west of the runway at the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport in Vienna Township, the president and CEO of the chamber, Tom Humphries, reports.
“We still have about 42 acres out there. We’re still marketing it,” Humphries says. The last few years have seen little interest in the remaining property, he concedes, but with the maturation of the oil and gas market such locations “do hold a value,” he remarks.
Humphries says he’s encouraged by the new leadership at the port authority, including Vice Chairman Ron Klingle’s role in its economic development efforts. “When we purchased that land about a decade ago, our goal was to try to stimulate cargo around that base, that facility, so with Mr. Klingle and that board and the management of the port authority looking at opportunities out there, that land could have a play in that process,” he says.
This story first appeared in Mid-March edition of The Business Journal.
Copyright 2014 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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