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Raleigh, North Carolina to receive $400,000 in Brownfields grants from EPA

Release Date: 10/12/2004
Contact Information: Dawn Harris-Young, (404) 562-8421, harris-young.dawn@epa.gov

Today in Raleigh, North Carolina, EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt awarded Brownfields grants to the City of Raleigh, totaling $400,000. The grants are part of a nationwide selection of 219 grant recipients sharing more than $75 million in EPA Brownfields grants. "These grants fulfill our collective aspiration to pick up the pace of brownfields clean-up," said Administrator Mike Leavitt. "We will turn eyesores into retail stores, rail lines into trail lines, brownfields into ballfields." Raleigh will receive two $200,000 assessment grants. The City will use the hazardous substances grant funds to identify and rank brownfields in the targeted downtown area with a concentration of brownfields, and adjacent residential areas. Funds also will be used to develop a cleanup and redevelopment strategy, create a Brownfields Community Network, and implement a community environmental education program. The petroleum grant funds will be used to perform the same tasks for sites contaminated with petroleum. The city plans to target the top 100 sites that could provide strategic locations for business and service redevelopment projects during the next 10 years. Cleanup of these brownfields is expected to create jobs, increase the community's tax base, and make available clean, blight-free properties to provide greenspace and support economic development. The Brownfields program encourages redevelopment of America's estimated 450,000 abandoned and contaminated waste sites. Since the beginning of the Brownfields program, EPA has awarded 554 assessment grants totaling over $150 million, 171 revolving loan fund grants totaling over $145 million, and 66 cleanup grants totaling $11.4 million. Assessment grants are used to provide funding for property inventories, planning, environmental assessments, and community outreach.  More information about EPA's Brownfields program is available at https://www.epa.gov/swerosps/bf/index.html.