From tainted factories and deserted gas stations to closed smelters and old textile mills, the more than 450,000 abandoned or contaminated sites throughout America threaten our health and environment -- but also our economy. No one wants to live or work near land that's unsafe, water they can't drink, or air that's filled with toxic pollution. At EPA, we're working to transform our communities into clean, green, sustainable neighborhoods.
To help realize this vision, I'm in Lansing, Michigan, today announcing $76 million in brownfields grants to more than 200 clean-up projects throughout America. Lansing's recent challenges and recent successes demonstrate the importance of this funding. When a troubled auto industry left Lansing residents without jobs and with many unused, often contaminated sites, they put a $2 million brownfields grant to work and leveraged about $230 million in private investments. With new funding they're receiving, they'll be able to continue building on those results.
The story of Lansing is a story I'm hearing throughout the nation. In small towns and urban centers, we are investing in a green economy that puts workers on the job cleaning up the places they call home. The reinvigorated neighborhoods they build are not only cleaner and healthier places to raise a family, they're also better places to invest in a business -- boosting the economy and creating jobs often in areas most in need of help. Since the brownfields program began less than a decade ago, it has spurred almost 70,000 American jobs.
We're extending that record of success today by investing in places like Springfield, Missouri, where a cleanup grant will transform a former rail yard into parks and leverage $6 million in private investments. Or in places like Nassau County, New York, where a park, hotel, affordable
housing, and restaurant and retail space will be built on top of unused waterfront property -- creating more than 7,700 local jobs. By cleaning up these abandoned and often polluted sites we can transform them into bustling residential and business districts that will improve our health and our economy, and make our communities more resilient.
That is the story of the work we do at EPA. I'm happy to be continuing that story today to help President Obama revitalize America and set this nation on the path to winning the future.
Check out this photo slideshow of previously abandoned and now redeveloped sites.
For more information on EPA's brownfields program, go here.
Michael Brune: Dear EPA: Haste Makes Waste
Grants & Funding | Brownfields and Land Revitalization | US EPA
These programs are woefully underfunded. The pittance of millions here and there when billions are required just to dent the problem is all about big money trying to avoid accountability for their actions in the past.
Real conservative Republican voters being forced onto the Wall Street bandwagon as if it was populist is a sales job that seems to be failing.
What Wall Street wants and what Jesus would do are far apart.
Tea Party folks in particular are seeing how Wall Street has corrupted their agenda. The quality of the trolls has even fallen.
The rich creating problems through their greed and then expecting seniors and the sick to pay for it is just not American.
This is what the GOP just does not understand.
Print it? or just "tax the rich" some more?
If it's such a disgrace to you then why not volunteer to help clean it up? Or are you just like the post...a bit of talk supported by no action?
Ms Jackson, the federal government and the EPA need to get out of localized problems. The people of Lansing and the state of Michigan are responsible for the mess. They are the ones that should bear the brunt of the costs... not me.
The farther away the money control is from the people... the more fraud and abuse is evident.
The EPA and other federal agencies are regulating our futures away. Stop, Ms Jackson!
And the very existence of these toxic sites illustrates a tragic under-regulation of industry, but I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you speak from an ideological purity that cannot be reasoned with or debated with facts. I wish solving problems could be just solving problems, and doesn't have to be sifted through the lens of political power or ideology.
Oh... by the way... Super fund sites are crawling with dozers, earthmovers and backhoes... all spewing diesel exhaust. What twenty-first technology are we going to use to clean up the mess?
IPADS?
We should not allow American companies to sell products in this country, which are made in another country that does not meet our environmental or workplace saftey regulations. Else, we area simply hypocrites and guilty of exporting Love Canals to third world countries.
Likewise, if we don't want to drill for oil in our country, why do we accept oil imported from other countries that we implicitly allow to drill and degrade (according to your standards) their country and health. Quite hypocritical.
This group has been the most vindictive and petty to ever be in charge of the EPA!
Good, clean it up. You sound like a Shyster, Esq. I hope that they quit giving off shore breaks and tax them like working people. May be then they will stop going to China, which has already happened. Sorry you like lead paint and pollution, how about you go live in it.