El Paso Times - Business -
[Cached Version]
Published on: 4/2/2006
Last Visited: 4/2/2006
Steven Silver and Sergio Guerrero Jr. have spent the past few months trying to find someone to use an almost 4-year-old, $1 million loan fund designed to help developers clean up and redevelop environmentally contaminated buildings and vacant land known as "brownfields."
...
No one has received or even applied for a low-interest loan from the fund in the almost four years since the Environmental Protection Agency awarded the city $1 million for the loan fund, Silver and Guerrero said.
...
Since January, Silver and Guerrero have been going to developers, property owners and others to get someone interested in using the brownfield loan program, which provides loans with a 5 percent interest rate to clean up brownfield sites.
...
Only a handful of them went through environmental assessments, Guerrero said.
...
Brownfield redevelopment has been a tough sell in El Paso because vacant land is available to construct buildings on the city's edges at a cost that may be less than redeveloping an old site, said Guerrero, who for about five years was brownfields coordinator at the Rio Grande Council of Governments.Redeveloping a brownfield site may not be economically feasible for someone unless the person needs a particular location, Guerrero said.
"We (El Paso) would rather choose sprawl than redevelop old land," Guerrero said.
...
And it may make it difficult to get a $200,000 grant the city has applied for to fund brownfield assessments, Guerrero said.
...
Guerrero is now trying to persuade La Mujer Obrera and its economic development arm, El Puente Community Development Corp., to look at the possibility of putting its proposed museum or other project at what has been identified as a potential brownfield site on a 1.1-acre vacant lot at 1400 Myrtle, he said.
...
The offices are in two buildings that were formerly a plastics manufacturing plant and a jeans washing plant, Guerrero said.The city received federal money to assess the properties and had to do a small amount of cleanup, he said.
...
Groundwork El Paso Executive Director Steven Silver, right, stood last weekat a potential brownfield site in the 1400 block of Myrtle in Central El Paso with Sergio Guerrero Jr., brownfields coordinator for Groundwork El Paso.
...
For more information, contact Sergio Guerrero Jr., brownfields coordinator for Groundwork El Paso, which is overseeing the loan program for the city: 565-2602 or ssgul@elpn.com
9 online sources [ view sources ]
Profile is not claimed [ claim profile ]
