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EPA Awards Brownfields Grants to Fletcher and Woodfin, North Carolina

Release Date: 05/13/2005
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(Atlanta, GA May 13, 2005) The Towns of Fletcher and Woodfin, North Carolina will share $400,000 in U.S. Environmental Protection Agency brownfields grants to help revitalize former industrial and commercial sites, transforming them from problem properties into community assets. EPA Deputy Regional Administrator Stan Meiburg today awarded the grants during a ceremony in Woodfin. The towns were two out of 218 applicants selected to receive 302 grants totaling $75.9 million.

The Town of Fletcher will use the grant for community outreach activities, site planning/remedial design, and cleanup of a 28.5-acre former log home manufacturing facility located at 91 Municipal Drive. Funds also will be used to monitor the health of residents exposed to hazardous substances or pollutants. The Town of Woodfin will use the grant for site planning, remedy monitoring, and the installation of a passive gas collection system at the 96-acre Elk Mountain Landfill at 70 Old Beaverdam Creek Road. Funds also will be used for community outreach activities and health monitoring.

The Brownfields Program empowers states, communities, and other stakeholders in economic development to work together to prevent, assess, safely clean up, and sustainably reuse brownfields. Participants in the brownfields program gain access to expertise and other resources from more than 20 federal agencies.

A brownfield site is real property, the expansion, redevelopment, or reuse of which may be complicated by the presence or potential presence of harmful contaminants. The Brownfields Program promotes redevelopment of America's estimated 450,000 abandoned and contaminated waste sites. Since its inception in 1995, the program has awarded 709 assessment grants totaling more than $190 million, 189 revolving loan fund grants worth more than $165 million, and $26.8 million for 150 cleanup grants.

In addition to facilitating industrial and commercial redevelopment, brownfields projects have converted industrial waterfronts to river-front parks, landfills to golf courses, rail corridors to recreational trails, and gas station sites to housing. EPA's brownfields assistance has led to more than $7 billion in public and private investment in cleanup and redevelopment, helped create more than 31,000 jobs, and resulted in the assessment of more than 5,100 properties.

For more information on the grant recipients, go to: https://www.epa.gov/swerosps/bf/archive/pilot_arch.htm

More information on brownfields in general is at https://www.epa.gov/brownfields

CONTACT: Dawn Harris-Young, EPA Media Relations, 404-562-8421