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EPA Invites Municipal Officials to Workshops on Brownfields Grants Applications

Release Date: 10/03/2003
Contact Information: Andrew Spejewski, EPA Press Office, 617-918-1014

BOSTON – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today invited municipal, regional and tribal officials and non-profit community development organizations from across New England to attend one of two free half-day workshops on how to successfully apply for EPA Brownfields grants.

The workshops will be held on October 14, 2003 in at the Holiday Inn in Worcester, Mass. and October 24, 2003 in at the Manchester Center Holiday Inn in N.H. from 8:00 a.m. to 12:30pm. They will cover the EPA Brownfields grant application process and new criteria EPA will use to evaluate applications.

EPA urges even those who have attended workshops in previous years to attend, as the evaluation criteria and the application process have changed. Both workshops this year will cover identical material.

Brownfields are properties that are abandoned or underdeveloped because of environmental contamination or the fear of unknown environmental contamination. EPA's Brownfields Program provides funds and technical assistance to states, communities, and other stakeholders in economic redevelopment to work together to prevent, assess, safely clean up, and sustainably reuse brownfields. Grants are available for assessing individual sites, identifying and planning for redevelopment of sites within a city or region, doing cleanup work at sites, creating job training programs centered on environmental remediation, and establishing revolving loan funds to finance brownfields cleanup and redevelopment.

Last year EPA’s Brownfields program awarded 28 grants in New England for a total of $11 million. Nationwide, EPA awarded $73.1 million, and the budget request for 2004 is $120.7 million.

The application deadline for 2004 funding for assessment, revolving loan and cleanup grants is December 4, 2003 and the deadline for the job training grant program is December 1, 2003.

Registration forms and more information are available at https://www.epa.gov/region1/brownfields/whatsnew.htm or by calling Christine Lombard at 617-918-1035 or lombard.chris@epa.gov