US EPA Grant Allocation for Assessment & Remediation

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Today’s presentation will focus on USEPA grant allocation for assessment and remediation. With that, I’d like to introduce our presenters for today. We are pleased to have with us Jerry Minor-Gordon, Program Analyst with the USEPA Office of Brown Fields and Land Revitalization. Jeri is the National Competition Coordinator for the Multipurpose Assessment Revolving Loan Fund and Cleanup, or MARC, programs in the EPA’s Office of Brownfields and Land Revitalization. In this capacity, she is responsible for coordinating the MARC grant competitions and providing guidance and support to EPA regional brownfields offices. Before joining the Office of Brownfields and Land Revitalization, Jeri worked in EPA Region won New England as a Brownfields project officer and coordinated the regional ARC grant competitions.

We’re also pleased to have with us today Cindy Nolan, manager at the US EPA Brownfields and Redevelopment Section. Cindy has worked for the US EPA since 1983. From 1983 to 1998, she worked in the Superfund program and in the water program, negotiating cleanup plans for the Great Lakes Harbor sites. In 1998, she worked for several years on regional strategic planning and worked to transform the environmental programs for our six federally recognized tribes. She has been the U.S. EPA Region IV’s Brownfield Section’s chief since 2013, working with communities, states, other federal agencies, and Brownfield staff to manage grant funds and foster community revitalization. We’re also pleased to have with us today Brian Gross, Environmental Scientist at the US EPA Region 4 Brownfield Section. Brian has worked for the EPA’s Southeast Regional Office since 2004 and has worked as a Brownfield Project Officer for 11 years. He has previously served as the Acting Brownfield Coordinator for Region 4, the state lead for Georgia and now serves as the state lead for South Carolina. All right, that concludes our introduction, so now I will hand things over to Cindy Nolan to get us started.

Thank you so much, and I’d like to welcome everybody to today’s presentation from EPA Brownfield’s program. We plan to give you program updates with a particular focus on our new infrastructure funding and what programs and grants we will have available for this fall. As introduced, Jerry Minor Gordon will be talking largely about the national program and national grants, and Brian and I will be covering some regional perspective on this and a little bit about the infrastructure money itself. Here are a couple of links that are important. The first one is to the OVLR website, where you can find all the information you need about any aspect of today’s presentation. And we also like to make sure that you know how to connect to your regional offices in the areas in which you exist. The presentation today may have just a bit of a region four spin, but we think that’s okay, too.

All right. The agenda today is really to focus on the infrastructure money. And to do that, we’re going to take a look at the past fiscal year FY 22 funding that we are now awarding. And we’re going to take a look at what the infrastructure law allows us to do and gives us flexibility to do. And then Jerry will spend a lot of time going through what we’re going to be offering this fall, the administration priorities and the types of technical assistance we’re offering. And then Brian will be leading the discussion on particularly the state funding opportunities and the technical assistance we have available in the regions. And because both Brownfields and the Environmental Justice Program serve underserved communities, we always like to include a section about their funding along with our funding. And featured here on the slide, you see our classic Brownfield scenario where in the upper right-hand corner, we’ve got the industrial building that has been degraded and been sitting vacant for many decades. And in the lower right-hand corner, you can see it revitalized and it’s now a multi-generational life learning center Newport in Kentucky.

Okay, so here we jump into quite a bit of detail. This is a very detailed slide to begin with, but it has many important points, so let me go through this a little bit more slowly. First, when fiscal year 22 funding was announced last fall, we did not have the infrastructure money available to us. It was not available to us until the spring, when we were ready to select proposals. That gave us a unique opportunity to select more proposals, and so we had a very high success rate in fiscal year 22. That is year one of our infrastructure funding. This also gave us an opportunity to fund grants to states and tribes last year, and that was the first we had a pot of money exclusively available for states and tribes, and we awarded about 16 of those grants. So, as you can see, because we had infrastructure money available to us in FY 22, we selected about 40% more grants than we normally would have. So, our first year of funding is already over with in this unprecedented opportunity with these infrastructure funds, and now we are looking at years 2 through 5. I also like to emphasize the Revolving Loan Supplemental Funding that is highlighted here.

The Revolving Loan Fund Grant is a powerhouse of a grant, although it is also available to new applicants through the ARC or Assessment Revolving Loan Fund and cleanup funding available here. For those who have these funds, these funds can be used for up to 15 years. you can come in, an existing grantee can come in for supplemental funding to continue to clean up projects in their geographic area. And as you can see from the totals down here, this is a powerhouse of a cleanup tool and a funding grant within our program. So I’d like to give it some highlight, particularly in Region 4, because we don’t have as many revolving loan fund grants. Other regions have more. But this has been a key message point for me Region 4. And I think you can see here when you compare the plots of money, what a powerhouse tool it is. But geographically here, you can see where the funds went to in fiscal year 22. All right. And I like to show this screen. This is obviously just Region 4. We have our eight states. But the messaging here is that grant awards and grantees come in various shapes and sizes.

So you see the outline in blue for our planning districts and or our states as we have here in Mississippi or some of our planning districts here in Florida. We also have our counties in gold. So you can see those scattered out and then the points are the cities and or nonprofits. So the important message here is that as we offer larger awards moving forward, they should reflect larger geographic areas and smaller awards for smaller geographic areas. In region four, a big part of our audience is typically these planning districts because they give us the opportunity to get funds into small and rural communities in a way that we would have a hard time managing as an individual grant because not all are competent and ready grant managers. Whereas the planning districts, We have built-in grant management skills. Now, we’re going to spend a little bit of time on the infrastructure grant opportunity.

So I’d like to first thank Megan Quinn, who runs our grant team in OVLR, Office of Brownfields and Land Revitalization. And she did such a great job explaining the statute that all I need to do here is echo her words. So these next few slides are hers. And they’re very important points. The first is very clear in very clear terms, 1.5 billion for brownfields activities provided over these years, 22 through 26. Very clear in that. Also very clear, $300 ,000 each year to remain available until expended. So that means $300 million over five years 300 each year, but only awarded to EPA with OMB being our banker as we spend that. So our priority is to get those funds spent so that the next year’s allocation can be awarded to us as an agency.

Further detail, let’s take a look at how this breaks down. $1.5 billion means $1.2 billion here in the competitive grants and technical assistance areas, what we call $104K, highlighted right here. We are very fortunate and thrilled that Congress honored the nature of our relationships with the states and tribes, and set aside an additional $300 million specifically for 128A, which is also the section of the statute that refers to programs for our states and tribes. That’s very important to us because we like to think that our grant program, while it is a very **** part of what we do and it gathers a lot of attention, the states and tribes really carry out the bulk of the program. So we have more at the tip of the iceberg, and it’s important to recognize our states and tribes in this. So they also, Congress also laid out very clearly each type of grant we have and put in these really high dollar limit caps on the individual awards, which was very exciting initially. But we also came to learn that they gave us a cap of 600 million on these.

So we have big award possibilities, but we have an overall spending cap for what they call the big grants. And that’s important for us to keep in mind. So it’s this balance between getting more money into communities, but managing how many grants that it takes for us to do that and the size of those grants. So Congress gave us wonderful opportunities here for policy decisions that we can make internally. So the amount of the grants, the year that they’re offered, the types of grant products versus technical assistance, Each of these areas is an area that we get to balance each year, and the beauty of Brownfields is the way that we listen to communities and what they need. And we are creating new products to support communities all the time. So each year through this infrastructure money, you may see us balance and or offer new products to communities to support their revitalization efforts. We also have an opportunity to look at the administration priorities in targeting how we get that money out to communities.

But I like to reflect on David Lloyd, who’s the director of OBLR, and his comment that a lot of these priorities really are in lockstep with brownfields to begin with. So it’s sort of like they’re already baked in to the nature of the program that we operate and the communities that we serve and the challenges we seek to ameliorate in those communities. Now, we’ve thrown a lot of numbers out at you. So let’s have a little table here and get a clear summary. So here’s our five-year story. This is our 1.5 billion. And this is what it’s gonna look like as infrastructure money each year. The 104K is our grant and technical assistance pot of money. So 240 million each year, we’ll go to that pot of money. And our 128A is the state and tribal pot of money, 60 million. Now, in comparison, what we’re used to seeing under the competitive 104K is $90 million a year. So add 90 million to 240 and we’re up at three hundred and thirty million dollars a year again.

I’m going to use the word unprecedented We have got to take awesome advantage of the opportunity that Congress is giving us to put money and opportunities into communities to revitalize to create jobs and to Fill that new sense of community back for them So, we are triple the amount of money that we’re used to seeing. Similarly, with our state and tribal, the infrastructure money will be around $60 million a year. What we typically offer is about $47 million a year, so we’re doubling what we give the states and tribes.
1So, what we’re making clear is that each year for the next four years now, as it has been for FY22, we have two sources of fundings, our regular annual infrastructure funding from Congress that goes through the annual appropriation process, and then this infrastructure money that OMB is serving as our banker with, and they intend to dole out to us, separate from the annual appropriation, they will dole out to us 300 million a year. So two sources of funding, it’s broken down into two pots of money. All right, so with that as a background, I’m going to hand it off to Jeri, who will talk a little bit about the administration priorities and how that lines us up for what we’re going to be offering this fall. Jeri?

Great, thank you Cindy. EPA’s current administration priorities have a strong focus on serving communities that have historically been underserved and finding solutions that are sustainable and creating more environmentally just places as well as engaging with communities and organizations that have not previously operated in the brownfields arena and having this additional money from congress is giving us as cindy has said an unprecedented opportunity to do that so i’ll go through a couple of the initiatives as listed on the screen the first being the justice 40 initiative and this comes from an executive order that aims for at least 40% of the overall benefits of the federal investment, so all of federal government, to flow to underserved communities. We are really proud in our program that approximately 80% of the Brownfield grant applications that were selected last year met the Justice 40 criteria, and we look forward to serving more communities this year.

EPA and our partners have been actively working to reach new communities that may not have previously benefited from brownfield-related resources, a special focus on nonprofit community organizations, as they really help ensure that residents and businesses are represented in the revisioning of their communities. Now, we know that revitalization brings about change in communities, and we want to make sure that those changes also are a benefit to the residents and the long-term businesses in those areas and help maintain the cultural fabric of that community and not displace people. Finally, we are the EPA, so it is paramount that these brownfield sites do not become brownfield sites again 10, 15, or 20 years from now. So the safe reuse and revitalization of sites and where those sites are located is really essential to help communities understand and support structures that help them revitalize their sites in ways that mitigate future greenhouse gas emissions with infill, energy efficient and renewable energy powered redevelopment.

So these priorities are weaved into the different programs within EPA, within our division that we sit in within EPA and are certainly reflected in the technical assistance and grants that we offer. So, as Cindy alluded, we have authority from Congress under CERCLA, Section 104K and 128A. And through those authorities, we are able to offer not only competitive grants, but also non-competitive funding and technical assistance. Some opportunities are offered annually, while others are offered biannually, ad hoc, or on a ruling basis. So, we’re going to discuss a few of these opportunities, but we invite you to visit the Brownfields Program website for additional information. So, starting with our job training grants, these grants allow nonprofits, local governments, and other organizations to recruit, train, and place unemployed and underemployed residents of areas affected by the presence of Brownfield sites, which in turn will help them build more sustainable futures for their communities.

Trainees learn skills needed to facilitate cleanup of contaminated properties and obtain secure, full-time, sustainable future employment in the environmental field, including green jobs. These grants are offered on an annual basis and the project period is up to five years. EPA is currently reviewing applications that were submitted for the fiscal year 23 cycle, And we anticipate awarding approximately $12 million from the infrastructure funds to support 25 job training grants, which is more than we have ever done. So we are super excited about that. And we hope to announce those selections in winter of 2023. Now moving on to our multipurpose assessment revolving loan fund and cleanup grants. we often refer to these as our MARC grants. And entities that are eligible for these grants typically include local and regional governments, quasi-governmental entities, states and territories, tribal nations, and nonprofit organizations.

On our Brownfields Program website, there is a lot of information and resources about each grant type, so we encourage you to please click on the link and go to our website and review the information. One website page, excuse me, that might be of interest, is our Brownfields Policy webpage. And that webpage has an overview of some of the changes that we are looking forward to making in this next grant competition cycle. And two resources that we’ve added this year are charts to help communities determine what funds they can apply for if they’re looking to apply for more than one grant type in fiscal year 23, or if they currently have an existing open mark grant and are interested in applying for more funding. Our anticipated competition timeline is that we will publish in Grants.gov the solicitations in September. We don’t have a specific date yet.

The documents are going through the review process, and once we do have that information available. They’ll be posted in Grants.gov, but also on the Brownfield Program website. And then sometime late September, early October, we’re planning to host our annual outreach webinars where we will provide additional information and cover what is described in our solicitation documents and an opportunity to answer questions that communities have. Applications will be due sometime in November. Typically, we allow for 60 days for communities to respond to our solicitation. And then in the winter, we’ll spend time reviewing applications and receiving direction from our administration on which applications will be selected for funding and then announce them in the spring.

So this chart is a version of information that is also on our policy changes webpage might look a little different, but it’s the same information. And this is what we’re offering in or planning to offer in fiscal year 23. So you see in the top right corner, amounts are subject to change. Everything that we’re saying right now, this is our plan, sometimes best late plans, but this is our best plan for now. But just note that some things might change between now and the solicitations becoming public. But this chart is a great snapshot to show where EPA is putting its money. And it shows the anticipated number of wards that we will make by each grant type, as well as how many grants we anticipate funding through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Now you’ll see that the maximum amount per grant are listed in the third column from the left.

And as Cindy mentioned, you know, we have to balance what Congress has said we can do with the infrastructure money against our policies and kind of reality of the communities that we want to be able to serve. So larger awards will mean fewer awards, and we want to make sure that we still have a good amount of awards as well as money supporting communities. And so you’ll see that we are planning to use our infrastructure funds for our remediation grants, which include Rebombing Loan Fund and Cleanup, and the reason that we focus those funds on those grant types is that there’s no cost share. And so by statute, these grant types require a 20% cost share from recipients towards the project. But by using infrastructure funds, that 20% cost share is waived, and communities can use their resources as they best see fit to complete their projects.

Another thing I’ll point out from this chart, for those that might be familiar with our programs or how we’ve awarded grants in the past, this year there is more of a focus on remediation projects, both in the number of anticipated awards and the amount of total funding being awarded. And that’s not to say that assessment grants are not important, but we want to start shifting our resources to those cleanup projects so that they can move along and get to reuse. So we’re going to go through each of the four grant types starting with the assessment grants. Our assessment grants are very flexible and can be used to support a variety of activities, including community engagement, conducting inventory of brownfield sites, characterizing and assessing site contamination. Funds can also be used to develop APTAs and cleanup plans for specific sites, as well as broader area-wide and revitalization plans.

So we like to say an assessment grant can be used to do everything before putting a shovel in the ground. And on the slide are some examples of planning activities that are eligible under our assessment grants and a link to fact sheets for each of them. So we invite you to review them. I think there’s a misconception that assessment grants can only be used to conduct site assessments and we’re trying to dispel that myth and really encourage communities to take advantage of these resources and use funds for community engagement as well as planning. We will be offering three different types of assessment grants the first being our community-wide assessment grants. And these are great for communities that are just beginning to address their brownfield challenges and trying to wrap their heads around the challenges in their communities. These grants are also great for communities that have ongoing efforts to bring sites into productive reuse.

Grants are available for up to $500 ,000 for four years. The second type are our assessment coalitions, which are designed for one lead eligible entity to partner with two to four other eligible entities that do not have the capacity to apply for or manage their own EPA grant and would otherwise not have access to these Brownfield grant resources. Additionally, EPA strongly encourages that coalitions include eligible community-based nonprofit organizations as non-league members in order to promote a strong local engagement effort and to ensure that the community’s concerns and their vision for revitalization are well integrated and incorporated into the project. In fiscal year 23, the lead entity of a coalition must be a state, county government, tribal nation, regional council established under governmental authority, for example, regional planning commissions, or a group of general purpose units of local government established under the law, for example, councils of governments.

These grants are available for up to $1 million for four years. So again, reiterating Cindy’s point that larger wards mean larger geographic areas, that is our goal with these assessment coalitions that these lead entities are covering a larger area to serve multiple smaller communities within their geographic area. The third assessment grant type that we’re offering is the community-wide assessment grants for states and tribes. And this is our second time offering this grant type. And these grants are available to states, tribes, and eligible native corporations in Alaska to address brownfield sites throughout their entire jurisdiction with a special focus on small, rural, and underserved communities. These grants are available for up to $2 million for five years. Next are cleanup grants, and these grants provide funding to clean up and remediate brownfield sites.

Funds can also be used for cleanup planning efforts, as well as finalizing an APTA and support community engagement activities as it relates to the cleanup of that site. New this year, EPA is offering three funding levels, $500 ,000, $1 million, and $2 million. So applicants will need to pick which bucket they want to apply for and only pick one. All applicants have to own the site at time of application and they must maintain their ownership throughout the time that the cleanup grant is open. There are a number of pass-fail criteria for all our grant types, but particularly more for cleanup because we have to make sure that both the applicant and the site are eligible for the grant, and that includes demonstrating that the applicant is not liable for the contamination under CERCLA and making sure that the site is sufficiently characterized so that cleanup can begin.

As I mentioned before, we anticipate using funding from the Infrastructure and Investment and Jobs Act to support these projects, and therefore there is no 20% match for recipients to provide. Next are our multi-purpose grants, and this is the third year that we’re offering this grant type, and multi-purpose grants are appropriate for communities that have a single area that they’re focused on revitalizing. And that area could be a neighborhood, a number of neighboring towns that are connected, a district, a corridor or shared planning area or a census tract. And we found that successful projects are from communities that have already identified through previous community engagement efforts, this discrete area that has one or more Brownfield sites where they want to focus their attention.

These grant funds can be used to conduct all the same activities as the assessment and cleanup grants with a bit of more of a planning spin. And so recipients of these grant types will be required to complete at least one phase two environmental site assessment, complete one brownfield site cleanup, and develop an overall plan for revitalization of that target area. And that plan has to include a feasible reuse of at least one of the brownfield sites if there isn’t already a plan in place. These grants are available for up to $800 ,000 for five years. And finally, Including our revolving loan fund grants, provide funding to recipients to capitalize an RLF program. And then these established RLF programs in turn provide loans and subgrants to eligible entities to carry out the cleanup activities at a Brownfield site.

For all of our grant types, RLF programs are the most niche and the most demanding of recipients. So these are not for the faint of heart, but are very important in providing resources to communities. And so RLF recipients need to have a strong understanding of real estate finance principles and approaches. They have to have expertise in or at least the resources to loan underwriting, loan servicing, and credit analysis. They really also have to have a really good ability to market the RLF program on an ongoing basis. RLF programs are designed to operate for many years, possibly even decades. In such, there is a long-term commitment that recipients need to be aware of in terms of providing resources to make these programs successful. In fiscal year 23, only eligible entities will include those that do not have an open agreement under an RLF grant or are not part of an open RLF agreement at the time of application, only they can apply for an FY23 RLF grant. And again, we plan on using infrastructure funds here, so there’s no 20% match.

An eligible entity or a coalition of eligible entities can apply for up to $1 million, and the initial grant period is for five years. But SNZ mentioned during her portion that recipients have an opportunity to receive noncompetitive supplemental funding for RLF programs that are performing at a high level, and they can continue their program for up to 15 years. So that concludes the different types of MARC grants that we are going to offer in 2023. And no matter what type of mark grant you might be interested in, chances are you are not the person that will be out in the field doing the work. And so many of our grantees hire consultants, contractors that they’re going to procure to conduct the phase one and phase two environmental site assessments, conduct the remediation work, or even if they need a little bit more expertise with certain aspects of planning or design charrettes community envisioning.

So it’s very common that there’s another set of players in our Brownfield world. And so no matter what the contractor is procured for or when they are procured, be it before or after the EPA grant is awarded, entities, our applicants must demonstrate how the contractor was selected in compliance with the fair and open competition requirements at 2 CFR part 200 and 2 CFR part 1500. EPAs will not accept sole source justification for procurement contract services that are widely available in the marketplace. Also, firms and individual consultants that develop or draft specifications, requirements, statements of work, or invitation for bids or requests for proposals must be excluded from competing for such procurements. We have additional information on how to comply with the competition procurement requirements, and those are available in the link to the best practice guide for procuring services, supplies, equipment under EPA Assistance Agreements.

Next, we’re going to switch gears to our technical assistance that we offer. And so while EPA’s competitive grants are really well-known, let me start over, while EPA’s competitive grants are most well-known, we recognize that not every community is poised to manage their own grant, and so we really do try to meet the needs of communities in different avenues and meet them where they are. And our technical assistance is a great way to do that. So organizations that currently have our technical assistance grants are listed here on the slide. And each of these providers offer free technical assistance to communities with brownfield challenges, regardless if the community has a current brownfields grant or not. The providers in the first subject area assist with EPA’s regions with technical assistance and training to communities and stakeholders on a myriad of issues such as preparing grant applications, performing site inventories, reviewing historical information, clean up and redevelopment planning, just to name a few.

For our equitable development and brownfields planning technical assistance provider, we have Groundwork USA. And this is a network of 21 local trusts that are based in small legacy cities in underserved neighborhoods within larger cities, as well as rural communities. And so these trusts develop materials and provide free technical assistance to communities across the country. And they really work to promote and integrate environmental justice and equitable development principles when developing solutions to brownfield challenges. The last provider listed here, the Hazardous Materials Training and Research Institute, HMTRI, is based in Eastern Iowa Community Colleges. And they’re the technical assistance provider to communities that have a brownfield job training program. I also wanted to just quickly highlight upcoming brownfields technical assistance grants that we plan to offer later this year. And so EPA will have another round of solicitations for technical assistance providers, and these providers in turn will provide free support on a range of activities to communities in their brownfields journey.

And again, special focus on communities that have been historically underserved, small, rural, or otherwise distressed communities. And so here’s another great opportunity of how the infrastructure funds are going to help us advance EPA’s administration’s priorities. We’re looking to use $53 million to support technical assistance work throughout the country. And so the plan will be to have up to 11 recipients, one covering, not necessarily one, but having support covering each of EPA’s ten regions, and so we might have one provider covering more than one region, and then we’ll also have one provider to provide services nationwide. So again, this information will become available on the Brownfields Program website. Check back often for updates, and with that, I’m going to hand it off to Brian. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate it very much. Great job. Yeah, so I’m going to talk a little bit about how the program is managed at the regional level.

All the great resources and grants that Jerry just covered, you probably noticed they were competed nationally. They get awarded within each region. For those who don’t know, EPA has 10 regional offices. Each region has a brownfields office that includes project officers such as myself. And we work directly with the grantees, land revitalization coordinators, contract officials, grants management specialists, and so on. So once a grant is selected for funding, it’s assigned to a project officer, such as myself, to manage the grant. Each region is, of course, a little different, includes different states, and so, for example, I’m in Region 4, which is in the southeast, our office is in Atlanta, and the states in our region are, I would say, probably completely different in many ways, including the profile of the brownfield sites, for example, from brownfields projects on the west coast. So each region manages their projects. We’re in all 50 states and dozens of tribes. And, of course, we work in collaboration with our state agencies to assist our grant recipients.

An important part of our program is annual conferences. We just completed a national brownfields conference, which was in August. That happens generally every year and a half to two years. But also at the regional level, there are good workshops and conferences. For example, here in the southeast, the Florida Brownfields Association hosts a wonderful conference every year, and recently they’ve begun partnering with Alabama communities to host a larger, more regionally focused workshop. And these are, of course, open to anyone. You don’t have to be a grant recipient to attend these conferences. So, for those of you that are not working on any grant projects, these are still a great way to plug in to Brownfield’s work if you’re, you know, anyone from an engineer to a city planner to a developer, or even just a nonprofit organization. As far as Region 4, we’ve got a few bullets here of things that we’re working on.

One of those was trying to build up a revolving loan fund and ROF base. We have a large number of assessment applications every year, if you remember that slide from earlier on. And assessment grants are great. That’s how most communities begin. And we’re also very thrilled when communities can graduate out of the assessment program into, you know, redevelopment and cleanup, and whether that’s through cleanup grants or revolving loan funds. So, that’s one focus we have. As mentioned, each region has technical assistance providers. We try to take advantage of them and plug them in with communities to help them develop their project-specific goals. And as a reminder, that technical assistance, you also do not need to be a grant recipient that can be granted to any community if you come through our office. Another thing we’re focusing on, again, going beyond assessment, is helping communities identify the proper resources to help them reach those goals. And we do some of that ourselves, and as I mentioned, our technical assistance providers are also a great resource for that.

Another thing that’s happening these days is we’re hiring. This is not true just for the Brownfields program, but EPA-wide. I would say in general, EPA has kind of an aging workforce, and so this is partially in response to that and also partially due to the increased funding that Cindy and Jerry have been talking about. And of course, much more information about Brownfields where you live can be found at your regional version of the website. The Region 4 version is here at the bottom. Yeah, so Cindy touched on the importance of the state programs and really this is when you’re getting down to a site-specific project, this is you know where the rubber meets the road. This is where your cleanup determinations are going to be made and managed, where you’re going to make your remedy decisions. This is also where you confirm your liability protection.

Remember, Brownfields is generally a voluntary cleanup program. That’s been the foundation of Brownfields since it was established. There was a huge universe of small and medium-sized sites that were abandoned, blighted, whatever you want to call it. And the Brownfields program was created to encourage the voluntary cleanup of these sites in exchange for financial incentives and these, again, are given at the state level. So each state program is, you know, a little different, but it’s all kind of a version of that enrolling in a voluntary cleanup program in exchange for those incentives. Of course, we should mention that the states manage a significantly larger universe of sites than are touched by EPA grants. You saw the slide of the number of grants awarded, but the states work with many, many sites that EPA has no role in, so keep that in mind as well. That being said, these state response programs do receive funding from EPA to operate these state response programs.

Some of them do direct assessment work out of that funding, and some states and tribes are also grant recipients for the assessment and cleanup and revolving loan fund programs. So it’s a good thing to check if you’re in need of, for instance, cleanup funding. Check to see if the state or tribe that governs your project, if they have a revolving loan fund available for cleanup funding. That can be loans or subgrants. These days they’re very competitive, low interest rates to make clean-up projects happen. So another good thing to check where you live. Last thing I want to mention here, this is true, at least in our region. I don’t know if this is true for every region, but some of our states maintain lists of pre fall pre-qualified contractors and engineers to do work within their state. I think that’s mainly true for states that have grants, but this is another good resource that you could possibly connect with.

Okay, well, we’re on the topic of contractors. I wanted to mention another EPA program called the Targeted Brownfields Assessment Program, TBA, not to be confused with TAB, technical assistance. But this is a great option for single sites, one-off projects, and for communities that are either not interested in applying for a grant, don’t have the capacity to manage a grant, only have one site versus a community-wide project. So this is a program that’s operated out of each regional office, and the application is very In Region 4, it’s one, two pages or one page front and back. So this covers assessment work, Phase 1s, Phase 2s, cleanup planning. It does not cover the cleanup work itself. It kind of stops there. But it’s available year-round. You can apply at any time without having to wait for the grant competition schedule. Each regional office has engineering firms basically on a retainer basis to respond to those requests on behalf of TBA applicants.

I should also note that the projects are dependent on how much money is in the contract at a given time and also the pipeline of projects that are coming in. But in general, this can be a shorter path to addressing especially single sites than going through the grant application process. Okay, just one more thing I wanted to touch on. Jeri covered some of EPA’s high-level goals and objectives in her part of the presentation, including an emphasis on some environmental justice issues. We consider environmental justice, or EJ, one of our sister programs, and this is another area that is also experiencing some growth under some of the new funding. I’ll just briefly cover this, but the core part of their program is called the EJ small grant program. This provides funding for underserved communities to identify and address public health issues, which as we know can affect different communities unequally.

I won’t say it out loud, but note the eligibility and the timing for each of these as I go through. The second program here is for projects that need to build collaboration using EPA’s seven-step collaborative problem-solving tool. And the third one here, the state EJ cooperative agreement, is for more of a state-level projects versus the community-level projects in the first two that are designed to directly improve public health. One more thing I wanted to mention on EJ, and I wanted to mention this because this is an opportunity that is open right now, and it’s also a new program that the EJ program is rolling out called Riving Communities Technical Assistance Centers, which they’re calling TICTAC. So this has approximately 50 million available nationwide for setting up or establishing centers that will assist communities in identifying and negotiating funding opportunities and other paths towards improving public health in their areas.

So I gave this its own slide because as I said it’s a new program and number two it’s open for applications right now and you can find more information at the EJ link at the bottom of this slide and they have also provided some training around this opportunity, which if you go to this link you can view the recordings of those sessions. And that brings us to the end of our presentation. I thank you all very much for attending and listening and thank you for your interest in the Brownfields program.