Current Projects

The Southeast Regional Environmental Finance Center, funded by EPA’s Environmental Finance Team through Region 4, is one of nine centers in the national Environmental Finance Centers network. The mission of the Louisville EFC is to identify and provide information about more environmentally and economically sustainable alternatives to uncontrolled and unfocused spatial expansion of human settlements; and improve the efficiency of environmental infrastructure service delivery. Current EFC project activities include:

• Preparation of Practice Guides for state and local officials, their staffs and citizens at large who are interested in smart growth and environmentally sensitive but economically efficient land use and development policies.
• Analysis of the different patterns of changing urban land use and of efforts to direct the spread of urbanization, to prepare guidance materials for local governments on choosing approaches to control their growth and promote more sustainable development.
• Provision of technical assistance to state and local programs supporting contaminated land redevelopment efforts across the Southeast
• Support for the risk management efforts of local public sector organizations undertaking leadership roles in brownfield redevelopment in EPA Regions 4, 5, and 7.

“Re-Defining Brownfields - The Brownfield Institute.” In October of 2005, The Center for Environmental Policy and Management at the University of Louisville in partnership with Louisville Metro Government’s Metro Development Authority and the Center for Neighborhoods, received a three year grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.  This grant would permit the three agencies to collaborate around the notion of fostering community participation in brownfields redevelopment in the Park Hill Corridor of Louisville’s west end. The three partners initiated the project by developing the “Brownfields Institute,” a series of workshops that serves to provide a forum for building knowledge in the broader community about brownfields cleanup, in general, and in the Park Hill Corridor specifically.

The goal of the grant is to open paths for community participation in the revitalization of this corridor in terms of addressing brownfields.  This is being done by providing training and technical assistance to community stakeholders. Residents, developers, non-profits, social service providers, bankers, land owners, business owners, religious leaders, environmental specialists will be among those expected to participate in the Institute.

The collaboration will provide a forum for community stakeholders to develop a vision for the corridor that can then be used in a larger planning effort. The workshops will also serve to connect individuals and organizations for the purposes of developing specific community stakeholder driven projects within the corridor that will foster brownfields revitalization. The workshops will continue through 2008 and will build community and economic development by bringing people together around a common interest in revitalizing Louisville’s once vibrant industrial corridor.

Products from the activities generated by this grant will serve as stepping stones to further grant applications and other larger efforts aimed at investment in the revitalization of the Park Hill Corridor.

To learn more about Re-Defining Brownfields and the Brownfield Institute, visit http://www.redefiningbrownfields.org.

“Expediting Public Sector Acquisition of Brownfields Insurance.” This project, a collaboration with Northern Kentucky University initiated in October, 2002, is funded by the EPA Office of Brownfields Cleanup and Redevelopment. We are monitoring public sector-led brownfield redevelopment projects in cities in three different EPA Regions to see how they pursue insurance or other risk management objectives and to identify the barriers to brownfield insurance acquisition by local government entities and how they may be overcome. The project objective is to prepare a report describing best practices in public sector risk management and insurance acquisition that will offer guidance to other local brownfield working groups.

“Urban Regeneration through Environmental Remediation: Valuing Market-Based Incentives for Brownfields Development.” This research project for EPA’s National Center for Environmental Research was initiated in May, 2002, under the NCER program on Market-based Mechanisms and Other Incentives for Environmental Management. It is conducted in collaboration with Resources for the Future and the University of Maryland . The study examines developers’ different valuations of a variety of cash and risk reduction incentives offered as inducements to attract investment to brownfield sites using conjoint analysis of forced choices between combinations of incentives. Comparisons of public and private sector perceptions of the values of different incentives and the key risks associated with contaminated land projects are also examined.

“ Accelerating Brownfields Cleanup and Redevelopment with Innovative Uses of Environmental Insurance (EI). ” This five-year program of research and technical assistance provision, another CEPM collaboration with Northern Kentucky University in which we were joined by the Colorado Brownfields Foundation, is funded by the EPA Office of Brownfields Cleanup and Redevelopment and was launched in October, 2003, to undertake a series of discrete tasks:

1. Trends and Innovations in the Brownfields Environmental Insurance Marketplace -- This task includes: (a) chronicling the experience of existing state EI programs and providing technical assistance to and monitoring other states’ efforts to provide brownfield risk management tools; and (b) updating an NKU report on EI products available completed for EPA in 1999.
2. Gas Station Insurance Pools -- This task responds to the expansion of the legislative mandate for brownfields efforts to include petroleum-contaminated sites. Work includes: (a) accumulation of background data on the use of environmental insurance by the public and private sectors, both for actively used and closed underground storage tanks; (b) technical assistance to, and examination of decision processes in, two case studies of utilization of environmental insurance to assist redevelopment of petroleum brownfields; and (c) analysis of the prospects for assuring the availability of funds for underground storage tank (UST) site mitigation through conversion of state UST cleanup funds to prepaid insurance coverage plans.
3. Technical Assistance and Training Tools -- This task involves development of self-instructional materials and other tools for local officials, including (a) preparing a website targeted to government representatives, developed with insurance underwriters and brokers to assure accuracy of information, and (b) preparation of new Practice Guides based on the project activities, to be added to the series released by the CEPM and available for free download.
4. Environmental Insurance and Area-Based Brownfields Redevelopment Programs -- Since the vast majority of brownfields are small, both in area and in expected cleanup cost, and scattered across economically depressed areas, few single sites offer the above-average returns on investment needed to attract private capital. This task involves development of a broadly applicable area-based approach to brownfields, including: (a) derivation of lessons for area-based brownfields programs from prior local revitalization efforts, including military base closures and traditional neighborhood regeneration programs; (b) and examination of the potential of ‘finite risk’ insurance programs as tools to provide assurance to all property owners in an area that the risk-based corrective actions taken to facilitate brownfield reuse will not pose long-term risks due to residual contamination or the possibility of failure of institutional and/or engineering controls on remediated sites.