The State Legislature should push important changes to the brownfields cleanup program, which now allows generous tax credits benefiting downstate high-rise projects while fallow upstate land goes untended.
In the brownfields bill that became law in 2003, New York’s good intentions of spending millions to clean up polluted industrial sites morphed into a money train for downstate developers, with little of that program money going to new business or affordable housing. With a revised bill as part of Gov. Eliot L. Spitzer’s proposed budget, the administration is trying to derail a runaway locomotive.
Currently, the more a developer builds on a brownfields site the more money he gets. For a $100 million project, a developer can get between 10 percent and 22 percent in state funding. That’s true for both upstate and downstate, but there is a practical difference — there aren’t as many largescale projects upstate, and land here isn’t worth the same as it is in New York City. The program’s tax credits haven’t been enough to attract projects to the real core areas where brownfields exist — but they’re gravy for projects on alreadyvaluable New York City-area land where development projects would have happened anyway, because of the high value and potential even of contaminated land in the Big Apple.
Upstate economic development director Dan Gundersen and Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner Alexander “Pete” Grannis have joined forces to amend the brownfields cleanup program with respect to the tax credits. They want to achieve several important goals, including making the tax credits available to projects that truly require an incentive, and not those being built regardless. Instead, those properties will receive a release of liability if cleanup standards are achieved.
State assistance still would be distributed to projects, but the evaluations would be separated. Economic development aid would be least changed, based on project economic potential, but brownfields cleanup aid would be measured more strongly against the need for financial help with cleanup costs.
Under this proposal, half the projects in the program will do better, and virtually every upstate project would receive more aid. Not lost is the increased likelihood of inner-city cleanups and development, with incentives through communitywide project planning for economically distressed areas and neighborhoods blighted by brownfields.
A $15 million cap on credits for each project should guarantee that a small number of expensive downstate projects do not empty the state trough. That, according to the proposal, evens the playing field for upstate projects with lower overall development costs but complex cleanups, and means less taxpayer money would go to the mostly downstate highcost projects that would have been built anyway.
Land lying fallow in Manhattan is virtually nonexistent. Some property in upstate, even totally clean, would not be marketable. The current law treats all brownfields the same, regardless of location. This new proposal acknowledges that all brownfields are not the same, and that some will need more help than others. Right now, that’s an administration proposal. The Legislature needs to get involved.