A cleanup that will never be over

It was understandably overshadowed amid coronavirus coverage, but Connecticut won some important federal funding earlier this month that is vital to the state’s economic future, pandemic or not.

In Middletown, Shelton, New Haven and elsewhere, the state was awarded federal money for projects that will help clean up property contaminated by years of industry that left pollutants in the ground. If there’s any hope in bringing back to productive use hundreds of acres of potentially valuable land, it will have to come with help from the state and federal governments.

But that help has its limits. Unless and until a private developer takes notice, sites are likely to sit fallow regardless of how much public money goes into them.

The New Haven project, known as the River Street Municipal Development Plan, is especially interesting. It’s a plan that dates back almost two decades at a heavily industrial section of a once- heavily industrial city, but is today envisioned as taking advantage of riverfront views in a city that is among Connecticut’s leaders in commercial and residential development.

“It’s a difficult area to develop because it’s in a flood zone,” said Helen Rosenberg, a city development officer, in an interview last week. But in a city where many development opportunities have been snapped up, it presents an increasingly rare opportunity. “We don’t have 10 acres anywhere else in the city.”

To say it’s been a slow process is an understatement; the city started work there in 2002. There has been some development interest, but the multiple complications on the site, not limited to pollution but also involving waterfront issues, have slowed things down. Until one or more developers is attached to the project, it will be completed in increments, if at all. This is through no fault of the city of New Haven, which is moving in the right direction but doesn’t have the resources to clean and redevelop the property alone.

Brownfield funding remains crucial to turning around the fortunes of municipalities whose industry has fled. It can make the difference between an abandoned building and a center of commerce. But it’s rarely enough without private funding sources.

Most brownfield sites turn into successful businesses only because a developer takes interest in the site and funds a cleanup, reasoning that the eventual returns will more than make up for the upfront costs. Public funds are supposed to bridge the gap between what a cleanup would cost and what an interested developer would be willing to pay.

Even when it works perfectly, there’s nowhere near enough money being spent to tackle the size of the problem. In a release announcing the new funding, the Environmental Protection Agency said that under the current administration, “EPA has delivered approximately $ 287 million in brownfield grants directly to communities and nonprofits for cleanup and redevelopment, job creation and economic development through the award of over 948 grants.”

That sounds like a lot of money, but less than $ 300 million over three and a half years doesn’t even put a dent into a multibillion- dollar nationwide problem. And while the state of Connecticut had been a major source of brownfield funds under former Gov. Dannel Malloy, his successor, Ned Lamont, let brownfields get caught up in his “debt diet,” which had the effect of halting one of the most successful state economic development programs, though officials say that spending will now be back on track with the tolls debate in the past.

Even given all that, there are bigger problems. Whatever the benefits of spending money to clean up currently contaminated sites, there is little question that new problems are being created faster than we can deal with the old ones. In the past three years, the same White House that is spending money to fund cleanups has eliminated hundreds of environmental restrictions on toxic substances, emissions and pollutants, all of which have the effect of worsening human health in the short term while guaranteeing more contaminated properties in the long run.

Many Connecticut sites that are in most need of brownfield cleanup dollars have contamination that goes back centuries; some are in locations where the state’s industrial history runs deepest. Those remain the most challenging cases because the extent of the problems runs so deep.

But continuing to allow the emission of new contaminants means this is a problem we can never solve. No matter how much we clean up, there will always be more sites. The first step toward solving our problem of polluted properties must be to stop creating more of them.