City of Fairmont, West Virginia, receives Local Leadership award at WV Brownfields Conference

“It’s given to a local agency, government or group of people who work at the local, neighborhood community level on addressing Brownfields for a number of different reasons, whether that’s assessments or adaptive reuse or remediation,” Fairmont Director of Planning Shae Strait said. “It was awarded to the city because of the amount of work that we’ve been able to do over the last three years to help both private and public partners with site assessments, reuse planning and implementation of adaptive reuse of Brownfields sites.”

Strait explained that Brownfields sites are former commercial or industrial areas that were abandoned or left vacant. He said that while they positively impacted the community’s economy once upon a time, they’re now a detriment to the city, be that for environmental, commercial or simply aesthetic reasons.

Alex Petry, assistant city planner for the city of Fairmont, said these assessments are a crucial first step to bringing these sites back to productive use.

“Removing blight and taking those necessary steps to remove blight is a good thing,” Petry said. “Removing blight and cleaning up Brownfields sites is not easy, and there are a lot of due diligence tasks that need taken care of when it comes to remediation.”

Over the past three years, the city has used its grant funding to hold eight Phase I environmental assessments at various sites across the city. Strait explained that these assessments include site observations and historical research on properties to determine if further investigation into environmental contamination is needed on site.

“This is usually things like checking records to see if there are underground storage tanks or if someone produces something that could be hazardous on the site, such as glass manufacturing and so forth,” Strait said.

An example of this is an assessment the city did on the old city center building on Fairmont Avenue near CVS, which was recently purchased by private developers.

“(The assessment) helped them understand what was in the building before they acquired it for private development,” Strait said. “Now, they’re prepared to move forward with some amazing plans to adapt that building into something new and really make it a wonderful site for the community.”

With the funding, the city also performed four Phase II environmental assessments, a much more hands-on process throughout which officials collect samples to test soil, water and more to figure out the contamination level of a property and come up with a plan to remediate that contamination.

“We looked at larger areas or more complex sites, and we tried to envision different ways that those could be renovated into something that contributed back to the community,” Strait said.

Finally, the EPA funding has been used to create three large-scale site reuse plans. Petry said that one of these was titled “Get it while it’s hot,” explaining that it focused on reusing of YMCA and old firehouse downtown. He said that it also acted as market study for the downtown area, giving demographics and economic data concerning the district.

“That study has been great not only in helping us learn and dig into the data, but also to use that data to leverage more funds,” Petry said. “Multiple agencies use that (study). … Grant administration is most successful when there is buy-in. … Everyone at the city understood that what we were doing was important, and if we had to work with any of the other departments to make grant administration easier, everyone was so easy to work with.”

While funding from the original grant is gone, Petry and Strait explained that the city has been able to use the grant and the projects from it to leverage more funding and projects to the tune of over $122,000.

Strait said that the planning department is very thankful to be recognized for the past three years of work with the Local Leadership award, while also saying that he thinks the award was well-deserved due to how creatively the city used the EPA grant.

“It’s one of the most impressive projects that a smaller local government has taken on,” Strait said. “The planning department spearheaded this over the past three years, particularly (Petry) and his dedication to the work managing the majority of the grant and the administration of it. … It is impressive, the amount of work we got to do. …

“A lot of times, when communities seek this (funding) out, they’re talking about one or two locations, but Fairmont looked at it very differently. We looked at it at a city-wide scale and really tried to focus on any number of areas that we thought were an opportunity to have an immediate impact. With that, Fairmont was unique in the way it approached and handled the assessment grant.”

Strait added that the city intends to apply for additional funding, be it another assessment grant or a cleanup grant which can be used for remediation of sites. While officials haven’t applied for anything additional yet, Strait said it’s only a matter of time before this critical work for the community continues.

“We’re still assessing where we’re going to be when the grant cycle closes,” Strait said. “We want to figure out what would be most beneficial for our community, and we’re working through that right now.”