Who pays to clean up history? Brownfields money for old buildings

To get federal money to clean up a Pearl Harbor tugboat, Arkansas first had to turn it into land. The USS Hoga, one of two ships that remain from the attack and a National Historic Landmark since 1989, was carrying asbestos, lead paint and other hazardous material when the Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum had it delivered by barge to Little Rock on the Arkansas River. The Environmental Protection Agency's brownfields grants pay to clean up contaminated real property, and a ship is not real property. The fix was a state historic preservation easement, which gave the Hoga a legal property description. With that, the museum applied again and got the grant.

It is an extreme case of a common problem. Old buildings are full of things nobody would build with today, and the money that pays for historic preservation rarely pays for removing them.

What old places are contaminated with

Route 66 is the textbook example. Tulsa's Cyrus Avery established it in 1927, and the traffic filled its 30 miles through Tulsa — and the rest of its length from Chicago to Los Angeles — with service stations, plating shops, painting operations, motels and salvage yards. Redeveloping that roadside now means dealing with what they left in the ground.

Four ways to pay for it

Targeted Brownfields Assessments pay to find out what is there. A Phase I environmental site assessment costs about $3,000–4,000; a Phase II, if the first finds problems, from tens of thousands of dollars to over $100,000. EPA and state and tribal programs will do the work for public bodies, or non-profits working with one — up to $200,000 a site, usually $50,000–100,000. Tulsa used it on the 23-acre Oklahoma Ironworks site, once the largest steel producer west of the Mississippi.

Revolving loan funds lend for cleanup, at low interest, to owners who did not cause the contamination, with a 20 percent match. In Tulsa one loan covered asbestos removal estimated at over $50,000 a floor in a downtown high-rise in a National Register district; it worked as a bridge until the owner's historic tax credits and long-term financing arrived, and the repayments went back into the fund.

Petroleum storage tank funds exist in all but a few states. The federal Leaking Underground Storage Tank Trust Fund, created in 1986, passes about $90 million a year to states and tribes, and states spend about $1 billion more. They pay for testing and cleanup, but usually not for pulling out the tank itself.

Brownfields cleanup grants are competitive EPA grants for sites where cleanup costs more than the property is worth — the case the Hoga was.

Why it pays

EPA counts $16.11 of other investment for every federal brownfields dollar, and more than 97,000 jobs. Sayre, Oklahoma, cleaned up 19 former fuelling stations on its Main Street — also Route 66 — and redevelopment followed along the corridor. In Wilson, North Carolina, Vollis Simpson's whirligig park and the infrastructure built around it drew over $30 million of private investment, and EPA followed with a $200,000 assessment grant and $1 million to start a revolving loan fund for the redevelopment. And in Franklin, North Carolina, removing an oil company's tanks and 3,200 tons of soil, watched by the Eastern Band of Cherokee's historic preservation office, found 13 feet of fill, laid down by floods and development, that had protected the Cherokee town of Nikwasi underneath.

Sources

K. Michelle Barnett, City of Tulsa Brownfields Program, "Brownfields Funding in Historic Preservation", in the proceedings of Are We There Yet? Preserving Roadside Architecture and Attractions (Tulsa, April 2018), published by the National Park Service's National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Figures cited there from the EPA (2009, 2014, 2017, 2018) and the Oklahoma Department of Commerce (2008).