Pulaski County gets $300,000 to assess ‘brownfields’

LITTLE ROCK — The Environmental Protection Agency has awarded Pulaski County a $300,000 grant to assess possible contamination or hazardous substances at so-called brownfields sites, with special attention paid to Little Rock’s 21st Street corridor and East End.

A sprawling former Veterans Affairs hospital on East Roosevelt Road and an old hotel just off Interstate 30 were mentioned as possible assessment sites in the county’s grant application, according to Josh Fout, the Pulaski County brownfields program administrator.

Brownfields are sites where redevelopment is impeded by the known or suspected presence of lingering contaminants or hazardous substances. The EPA’s Region 6 office in Dallas announced the grant to Pulaski County in a Friday news release.

The grant doesn’t necessarily mean the hospital and hotel sites will be assessed for contamination prior to redevelopment, Fout said Wednesday. The money could support environmental assessments around Pulaski County outside of Little Rock, he said.

Fout said he has yet to approach the owners of either the hotel or VA hospital about an assessment.

The 11-story former VA building is owned by a Christian religious group called the Institute in Basic Life Principles and encompasses about 520,000 square feet, Fout said. The group’s website lists the Little Rock facility on Roosevelt Road as a training center.

Additionally, the special operations division of the Little Rock Police Department is housed in the building, according to a police spokesman, Officer Eric Barnes.

The Arkansas Times in January 2018 reported an Irvine-based developer was exploring a proposal to fashion residential and commercial space out of the old hospital.

The unused hotel building just off Interstate 30 and Roosevelt Road was formerly a Red Carpet Inn, according to Fout. He said the building is around 80,000 square feet.

Fred Love, the Pulaski County director of community services, recalled a developer recently approached the city between 2018 and last year to express interest in obtaining an EPA assessment grant to eventually redevelop the old VA hospital.

Love said lead-based paint and asbestos are concerns for the building based on a walkthrough of the facility.

He estimated environmental remediation at the hospital will cost at least $1 million because of the facility’s scale.

“It’s going to be a major remediation job,” Love said of the work required per floor.

The grant to Pulaski County is limited to site assessment, not cleanup, according to Althia Foster, the EPA’s Region 6 section chief for the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, as well as the brownfields program.

Paul Johnson, an EPA brownfields project officer based in Dallas, said Pulaski County received the grant after a competitive nationwide selection process.

Johnson said applicants are asked for a few priority sites, such as the VA hospital and the hotel, so the agency knows “each applicant has projects that they’re ready to hit the ground running with.”

Money will be available to the county Oct. 1.

In the meantime, Fout said the county will begin to do outreach with partners such as the Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce and the East Little Rock Neighborhood Association to examine potential sites where assessments might be done.

After a grant is awarded, the next steps generally include research on the property to determine if there’s potential contamination related to the past uses of the site, Johnson said, and depending on the results of the assessment, sampling might be done to find evidence of leadbased paint or contamination of groundwater and soil.

The EPA previously awarded $350,000 in brownfields cleanup money to Pulaski County in 2015.

Love said developers often take advantage of EPA-financed assessments to evaluate property before purchasing it.

“It’s really smart for anyone who is purchasing a piece of property to do development to get the assessment so that you won’t have the liability,” he said. “Because once you [have] purchased it, then it’s yours.”

In addition to the Pulaski County grant, the EPA last week awarded another $300,000 assessment to the Southwest Arkansas Planning and Development District to examine priority brownfields sites in El Dorado.