Situated just minutes from Waterbury's downtown is an old, abandoned former factory complex. It dates back to the city’s manufacturing heyday. Companies churned out metal hoses there and other goods.
The site has languished for decades. What remains is concrete, a brick warehouse, a smaller structure beside it and environmental contamination.
In 2017, a redevelopment entity created by the city and the Waterbury Development Corporation (WDC) bought the property. It has invested nearly $3 million so far on cleanup.
“They're expensive to do, and things often move at a glacial pace,” Jim Nardozzi, the executive director of WDC, said of remediating sites like these, which are known as brownfields.
Many investors don't want to deal with environmental cleanup. But Nardozzi believes the site is well worth the cost.
“It really is in the heart of the city, like in the heart of downtown," Nardozzi said, peering out at the site behind a chain-link fence. "So to clean this up will really go far. We would love to get the site back on the tax rolls and not have it be such an eyesore.”
A brownfield is an abandoned or underutilized site where redevelopment hasn’t occurred due to the presence of pollution, or potential pollution.
Connecticut is home to more than 1,000 of these sites, from crumbling factories to shuttered dry cleaners and gas stations.
Experts say a longstanding state law is one reason why so many remain. Under the Connecticut Property Transfer Act, cleanup of a site was only triggered when a property was transferred, or sold. That process can be expensive and cumbersome, causing many property owners to walk away instead.
Beginning this month, Connecticut is overhauling those rules and moving toward a clean-as-you-go approach. The release-based cleanup regulations require property owners or long-time tenants to report, investigate, and remediate pollution when it’s discovered. That way it's harder to simply abandon a contaminated property.
Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Commissioner Katie Dykes described the new approach as “a win for the environment and a win for economic development.”
“It’s like the starting gun is going off,” she said. “We're going to see investment occurring, and ultimately, revitalization and cleanup of these properties.”
State’s “Transfer Act” slowed cleanups and redevelopment
For more than 40 years, the Connecticut Property Transfer Act was the main driver of environmental cleanups in the state. It required a site-wide environmental investigation – which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars – and clean up only when ownership of a property switched hands.
The law applied to a specific subset of properties: commercial and industrial sites, such as dry cleaners and vehicle body repair shops, as well as sites or businesses deemed as “establishments”, meaning they generate 100 kilograms (220.5 pounds) of hazardous waste in any one month.
That meant the law targeted not only big industrial corporations, but small businesses too.
That created major economic and environmental burdens for cities in the state.
Pollution at a number of properties remained unaddressed under the law, according to Roger Reynolds, senior legal director at Save the Sound, a nonprofit environmental organization.
“It didn't prioritize [sites] based on risk and threat [of pollution]. It prioritized them based on when a property was going to sell. So you could argue that it wasn't addressing the biggest risks,” Reynolds said.
The law also discouraged redevelopment of contaminated properties, according to Gary O’Connor, an environmental lawyer at law firm Pullman & Comley.
He said many property owners and corporations held onto their properties to avoid costly remediation.
“A lot of corporations and owners have decided to mothball, which created a huge negative impact in the communities in which those sites were located," he said.
The transition to the new approach won’t affect existing brownfields, since the majority of them are already enrolled in state remediation programs. But the change will spur owners of long-dormant properties that were never enrolled into any cleanup programs to take action.
Release-based framework will spur economic development, cleanups
The new release-based cleanup regulations that went into effect March 1 will put Connecticut in line with 48 other states with similar rules in place.
The new approach will also streamline the process to buy and clean up contaminated sites, cutting some red tape, according to DEEP.
“This change really reflects embracing the model that's been successful in other states around the country,” said Dykes, the DEEP commissioner. “We're going to see investment occurring, and ultimately revitalization and cleanup of these properties.”
State officials hope the change will also spur economic growth. The new approach is projected to create over 2,100 new construction jobs and contribute $3.78 billion of new growth to the state's gross domestic product over the next five years, according to the Connecticut Business & Industry Association.
This will make the state more competitive with neighbors like Massachusetts and Rhode Island, according to Frank Hird, a longtime commercial real estate broker.
“A deal that in Massachusetts might take four or five months to close could have been 12 to 15 months here,” Hird said.
For now, buyers and sellers are gearing up for the transition and the hiccups it may bring. Nancy Mendel, the outside environmental counsel for the city of New Haven, said communities will need more clarification in the coming months as the state transitions to the new model.
“It's 340-some odd pages of regulations,” she said. “It is a sea change in the way we do things in Connecticut, and it will take a while to get used to and to understand.”
The state's environmental office is hosting meetings with stakeholders to help them digest the changes.
In Waterbury, the city is dotted with sites in need of remediation. On a recent tour, Nardozzi stood outside a defunct metal plating business, which he said was abandoned in 1991.
Nardozzi hopes the change will help more people invest in Waterbury's future.
“Historians will look back and think that Connecticut made a major policy goof when we de-industrialized the entire state," he said. "Maybe there could have been a better approach, like clean as you go along, rather than simply walk away.”
