For every Goodwin College and Remington Rand success story, there are plenty of other cases where brownfield remediation goes wrong.
Because cleaning and developing a blighted, contaminated property involves many government agencies with a hand in the funding and/or regulatory process as well as various facets of the private sector, it feels like a miracle when a brownfield remediation completes the journey from concept to completion.
Out of 13,000 brownfield sites in Connecticut — ranging from a closed gas station to a major industrial site — 47 have been remediated since 1996. There are a few more in the queue, but the state’s success rate is still below 1 percent.
Case in point is the former Connecticut Foundry site in Rocky Hill, a 10-acre brownfield the town has tried to remediate going on 20 years.
In 2003, Rocky Hill entered into an agreement with Leonard Thylan, a New York developer, to turn the property into a residential and commercial development on the Connecticut River. Thylan agreed to purchase the property and pay $400,000 in back taxes while the town created a fund for the site’s clean-up and tried to obtain a $1 million brownfield grant.
Between the time that agreement was made and when Thylan submitted his first development proposal, the municipal government switched leadership — including the mayor — and the town’s desire for a development had switched to a park. Thylan’s proposed 135-unit senior housing and commercial development was rejected, as were followup submissions for 96 and 80 units.
“It is horrible,” Thylan said. “It is terrible. It is like torture.”
When Thylan refused to sell the property back to the town, the government eventually tried to obtain it through eminent domain. In December, a judge blocked the town’s condemnation attempt and ordered Rocky Hill to continue negotiating with Thylan.
Thylan, who still wants to develop the property, said if not for all the fighting with the town over the proposal, the project would have been completed by 2007 at the latest. Beyond the litigation fees, the years of fighting cost money in lost tax revenue and brownfield funding. Since the project would have been completed before the real estate market crashed, the units would have sold for a considerable amount of money.
“This was a great issue for everyone to get together, but instead it fell apart,” Thylan said. “All this wasted time, instead of something actually getting done.”
While a warning against brownfield development, the Connecticut Foundry problem also highlights the need for public and private cooperation when undertaking an issue as complex as remediation.
In the first week of December, the ABB Group in Windsor filed a plan for a $750 million, 600-acre development on the former Combustion Engineering site on Day Hill Road in Windsor. The proposal before the town calls for 3,500 housing units.
For a cleanup that includes the town, state and federal regulators — including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — the remediation work has been successful to date, said Barry Dillon, spokesman for ABB Group North America.
The company has spent $90 million cleaning the site to 80 percent completion so far and wants to be done in 2012. All the existing buildings will be demolished by June, and construction on the new development can begin even before the whole site is cleaned because only 3 percent of the 600 acres is contaminated.
“The project has gone very well considering what you have seen elsewhere,” Dillon said.
