From brownfields to innovation district
EPA program impetus for Old Town South revitalization
The vision for Old Town South is to turn it into an innovation district, an area that attracts entrepreneurs, startups and business incubators. They are physically compact, dense and accessible and provide a “mash up” of housing, office and neighborhood amenities.
Ultimately, innovation districts “create a sense of place,” according to Craig Stoffel, a project manager with the consulting firm Ayres Associates.
“You can’t just have a building or two in a parking lot and call it an innovation district. You really need that community component to it. This whole idea of this live, work, learn, play, stay area where people can live, go to work, do shopping during the day, walkability, all of those components are critical to the success of the concept of a district,” he said.
In 2021, a coalition consisting of the City of Yuma, Yuma County, Yuma National Crossing Heritage Area and the Yuma Multiversity Campus Corp. received a $600,000 grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the revitalization of the largely vacant brownfield in the downtown area. “Brownfields” refer to contaminated and abandoned industrial and commercial properties.
The Yuma City Council recently learned more about the grant program from Stoffel and Jerry Cabrera, president and CEO of the Yuma Multiversity. The EPA program works with communities to identify blighted sites that have been neglected and underused.
“What they found is that if we can convert those back into productive reuse, the investment that the EPA makes to plan and assess is a significant return on investment once we can get those properties back up and running and generating tax revenue,” Stoffel said.
Although it started with the Old Town South area, the idea has expanded to include satellite campuses. In all, the proposed district would encompass between 20 to 40 acres.
“We don’t want to over build or over plan and then just have half of it sit vacant, sit empty, but we want to make sure that we design it to be flexible and agile,” Stoffel said.
He believes the private sector will determine how many buildings actually get built and developed.
These districts work due to multiple sectors, partnerships, a physical connection to downtown, an anchor institution, “and then
really that sense of place placemaking and having a strong community center,” Stoffel noted.
This district would include different types of housing. “We’ve noticed, like many communities, there’s a missing middle, as what has been termed, where you have single-family housing, but you don’t have a lot of duplexes, townhouses, fourplexes, things like that. So we’re going to be looking at a variety of housing and student housing, if there are actual campus buildings on site,” he explained.
The planners will not encroach on the Colorado River and railroad. “We need to consider how those impact even lab spaces in the vibrations,” he noted.
Existing residents and businesses, he stressed, will not be displaced, and Crossroads Mission will be left alone. An effort will be made to involve the public and surrounding residents.
“We definitely want to encourage communication with them,” Stoffel said. “We definitely do not want to have a negative impact on the community. The existing businesses, we’re not trying to detract from them. That’s also another concern whenever we approach communities with this idea of revitalization or economic improvement. We want to make sure that we’re not taking away from existing businesses and not impacting existing homeowners.”
The program has four stages: planning, assessment, remediation and redevelopment. “Our grant is specifically for the environmental assessments and inventory and testing. Planning is really to be that revitalization vision of what it could be once it was cleaned up. So this grant is not finding any actual remediation efforts or cleanup,” Stoffel explained.
The Yuma Multiversity Campus is a big part of the concept. “Let me clarify that we are not a university,” said Jerry Cabrera, president and CEO of Yuma Multiversity.
The multiversity seeks to align education, industry, government and the public to promote and support high-tech growth and economic development.
“That’s one thing that we were working on, to make sure we establish those opportunities and promote that workforce development that we need here for Yuma County,” he noted. “We’re in a great region. Yuma alone has over 100,000 people, but the region itself, it’s over 1.7 million.”
He explained that Yuma County and local education institutions and industries are part of a bigger footprint that includes northern Mexico and the Imperial Valley.
Cabrera’s job is also to bring in more certifications to Yuma as well as finding out why students are leaving and not coming back. “There’s a lot of partnerships that we can create in apprenticeships, that we can create within our own industry here and they’ll stay here.”
As an example, he noted that the agriculture business lacks workers with the high-technology skills currently in use in the fields, such as laser equipment, and ag companies have to go out of town to find the needed skills.
Cabrera also explained that 65% of current elementary students will work in jobs that do not exist yet. Placing industry, education and workforce in one hub will benefit the entire region.
“At the end of the day, it’s for the bigger economic development of the region,” Cabrera said.
As far as the cleanup, the project is currently in the environmental site analysis phase, which will identify the level of contamination and what needs to be done to fix it. The next step is to apply for remediation and cleanup grants.
“You definitely play the long game with these brownfield projects. They don’t happen overnight, but they do happen. I think, really, this is about setting the foundational work to continue to forge ahead,” Stoffel said.
“It’s hard for me to say when we’re going to be breaking ground, but I do think depending on what we discover in certain areas, we are creating some plans that will assist developer (requests for proposals) to attract certain potential developments to happen.”