by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
The Environmental Protection Agency has granted the City $200,000 to subsidize private business investment into polluted tracts of downtown land.
Jacksonville received one of 200 Brownfields Assessment Grants dispersed nationwide as part of an eight-year-old federal initiative designed to clean up and revitalize environmentally blighted areas. The City will make the funds available to small businesses looking to relocate along a pair of creeks, which bookend downtown from the Acosta Bridge to the Shipyards.
City Brownfields Program Coordinator Ken Pinnix said the City would use the grant to supplement private environmental assessments of the sites, which were contaminated in the early 20th century by shipbuilding and drycleaning businesses. Pinnix said the money would likely be used to take soil and water samples, which would determine the sites’ future viability as commercial properties.
The Planning Department has targeted the area surrounding the Hogan’s Creek-St. Johns River confluence as its first priority and will request bids to assess the area as soon as the federal funds become available. Pinnix said viable, job-creating businesses would be first in line to receive the funds.
“We’re giving priority to areas which have the best opportunity to create jobs and revitalize the surrounding area,” said Pinnix.
In its proposal to the EPA, the City estimated it would make 10 to 12 loans averaging $37,500 over a three-year period.
Following the environmental assessments, the City will seek $200 million allocated by Congress to clean Brownfields sites.
The sites targeted by Jacksonville cover 20 square miles within the city’s federal Empowerment Zone. The City designates the McCoy’s Creek and Hogan’s Creek areas as greenway corridors linking east-and-west-end neighborhoods to downtown. Additionally, the Planning Department hopes providing river access will stimulate commerce in neighborhoods where 37 percent of the residents live below the poverty line and the unemployment rate exceeds 12 percent. The areas are predominantly populated by low-income minorities. The area contains 162 reported contaminated sites.
While the City will not subsidize every clean-up effort, Pinnix said would-be developers could contact his department for guidance in receiving other available funds. He said the federal Economic Development Agency, Department of Transportation, National Parks Service and the Armed Forces all set money aside specifically for Brownfields projects.
“If we don’t have the money, hopefully we can connect investors with other agencies that do,” said Pinnix. “Shepherding people through the process is part of what we do.”
EPA Brownfields Coordinator Mickey Hartnett said Jacksonville’s proposal was selected out of 1,300 proposals dispersed from Florida to remote corridors in Alaska.
This is the Brownfields Project’s second phase. In 1997 the City provided $71,000 to small businesses looking to develop similar parcels of land along Myrtle and Beaver streets and the A. Phillip Randolph corridor. Pinnix said 85 percent of the targeted sites in those areas had been cleared of contamination.