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Two HV Communities Receive EPA Grants To Assess Contaminated Sites

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently announced $2 million in grants across six New York communities. And two recipients are in the Hudson Valley.

The EPA grants are to help communities clean up abandoned and contaminated sites, or brownfields. Kingston is getting two grants of $200,000 each to perform up to 26 environmental site assessments in the Rondout and Midtown areas, as well as provide support for community outreach activities. Kingston Mayor Steve Noble says the grant award is the next step in making the Waterfront and Midtown brownfields most developable and attractive to investors. Across the Hudson River in Dutchess County, a $200,000 grant for Wappingers Falls will be used to conduct 15 environmental site assessments, which Mayor Matt Alexander says will help, like in the following case.

“Down at the bottom of the hill, at the base of the falls for which we’re named, sits a very large 24-acre site which is just ripe for bringing back and changing and employing lots of people, as it used to do,” says Alexander. “It used to employ everybody in this village.”

He considers the former Dutchess Bleachery, the village’s oldest and largest manufacturing site, to have the greatest potential. Walter Mugdan is superfund director of the EPA’s Region 2 office.  

“These assessment grants are really a key first step because they do provide important information that can then help developers or people who do the visioning for reuse figure out what makes sense and what is plausible for a given piece of property, what kind of value there might be in that property once it’s cleaned up,” says Mugdan.

Wappingers Falls is part of Democratic Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney’s district.

"Of the 24-acre industrially-zoned property in the village, over 14 acres has been left vacant   after structural collapse or fire,” says Maloney. “So it’s a one-time infusion of funds to help the mayor get going on a bunch of different sites that are really important to clean up so we can grow the economy in Wappingers Falls.”

Dutchess County Executive Marcus Molinaro says the grant will help steer the village on the path to Main Street revitalization and infrastructure enhancement to attract and expand its business base. He believes that, along with moving forward revitalization efforts in Poughkeepsie, efforts in Wappingers Falls will reverberate countywide.

“We have often said, and it’s really a credit to Mayor Alexander, that the Village of Wappingers Falls provides both some of the biggest challenges but greatest opportunities for Hudson Valley economic recovery. It is a contained community with a strong business base, strong community leadership, strong community involvement but significant infrastructure and structural concerns that need to be addressed,” says Molinaro. “And what the mayor has put together over the course of the last several years is a very aggressive effort to see total community recovery.”

He says the county will learn from the efforts of Wappingers Falls. Mayor Alexander drills down into an example of what this EPA grant will enable the village to assess.

“If, for instance, that building that’s still standing in the middle of the Bleachery in the superfund site, this will help us sort of get underneath that foundation, start to understand what needs to be done for somebody either 1) to be able to move into the building or, 2) does the building need to come down and do we need to move forward in that direction,” Alexander says. “And that has been a huge question because most of the DEC [NYS Department of Environmental Conservaton] remediation work that’s happened around that area has not been able to address what may or may not be underneath the foundation.”

Alexander says the assessments will be communitywide, including at the Mount Carmel building on West Main Street.

“For every dollar spent on a project, on an infrastructure project we’ve seen $2 come back in private investment,” says Alexander.

The grants awarded to Wappingers Falls and Kingston are part of nearly $2 million in such EPA grants to communities in New York, including to Rome and the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe. Overall, the grants are part of a $55 million EPA effort to help more than 130 communities across the U.S. revitalize contaminated properties.

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