There’s an interesting program at Bear Paw Development. It’s called the Brownfields Program and it focuses on eliminating contaminants within the community.
Sara Strissel the Director of Community Planning and Brownfields at Bear Paw development explains more.
“So, Brownfields is any underused or vacant building or property that has contamination, and if there is like petroleum contamination, or asbestos, or lead based paint, banks won’t finance the transaction of selling these properties so that’s what we see a lot. They are eligible for the Brownfields program if they have plans to redevelop it or turn it into something more useful for the community.”-Sara Strissel
Sara gives an example of a current Brownfield project.
“There’s so many projects along the Hi-Line that have been done or helped with Brownfield’s funding. We were able to take Brownfield funding at Chester Motors all the way in Chester and do the testing and found that they can’t sell this property because the petroleum contamination from years and decades of underground storage tanks that are leaking and risking getting into ground water and spreading throughout the town. They couldn’t sell this to a local Ag producer there that wanted to expand their services and provide more economic and environmentally friendly fertilizer and things like that because the contamination was three times the cost of the overall value of the land. So, we just recently submitted a DNRC reclamation grant, actually went and testified in front of the legislature for that, that ranked fourth. So, we’re likely going to get some funding from these other programs that we can leverage the Brownfields work to get the cleanup and get these harmful contaminants out of our area.” -Sara Strissel
