Tuesday, April 29, 2003

Clinton to developers: Think big, take risks

Conferees told to focus on brownfields

BY TODD MCADAM
Press & Sun-Bulletin

Hillary Rodham Clinton can think of a hundred places Greater Binghamton can pattern itself after: Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Boston, and Akron, Ohio -- a host of communities in the Northeast and the upper Midwest that turned brownfields into fields of cash.  

"They could all have been called industrial wastelands," New York's junior senator said Monday at a conference on finding ways to clean brownfields.

That was one of two reasons she was in Broome County on Monday. Nominally, she came to introduce a conference to teach 200 public and private economic developers ways to clean up the area's 80-plus brownfields in Broome and Tioga counties -- nearly 1,800 acres worth of used and presumed polluted industrial and commercial sites -- and to announce that a New York chapter of the National Brownfields Association is forming in New York to help them do the job.

But she also came to climb aboard the BC Plan's recommendations and to throw her support behind the Greater Binghamton Coalition, an eight-member organization designed to enact the plan and revive the area's economy.

"If you're down on yourself, you can't sell yourself," Clinton said. "It has to start with the individual and with the leadership."

With the BC Plan and its hundred-odd economic development tasks, she said, Binghamton has begun selling itself -- but only after decades of lying idle while other communities looked toward their future.

"You've got to have some people willing to take some chances," Clinton said. Chances, as in the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, or Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

"They were wacky ideas, but people believed in them and sold them. We've got to have some excitement," she added, snapping her fingers.

Now that the plan is in place and the coalition is working on it, she's willing to help. Her staff organized the brownfields conference at Broome Community College in Dickinson.

"We don't have any way to make new land. It is what God gave us and it is our job as stewards of the land to make the best use of it," Clinton told about 200 public officials, developers and real estate agents at the college's West Gym.

Greater Binghamton, like many Northeast and upper Midwest communities, has just about as much old industrial land that could be re-used as it has greenfields that are easily developed, but communities lack the knowledge of how to get federal aid to clean them, Clinton said.

That's where the National Brownfields Association comes in. Robert V. Colangelo, the association's executive director, said refurbishing brownfields is essential to any community's revitalization.

The Chicago-based association helps community and private developers find a way through the red tape of 22 federal programs that can help brownfields cleanup.

"Changing a community's image is a challenge," Colangelo said. "By focusing on their brownfields, it creates a ripple effect."

Those ripples include the creation of jobs in the cleanup, a reduction in blight, attraction of new investment and, eventually, a return on investment.

If that sounds familiar, it might be because Naima Kradjian has been making the same points with her effort to re-open the Goodwill Theater. The theater, on Willow Street in Johnson City, has been closed for more than 35 years. The greatest activity it sees is pigeon passion.

Kradjian hopes to refurbish the theater into an arts venue, incorporating production and educational programs. Her goal isn't to just revive the theater, but all of Johnson City's business district.

She hopes Colangelo was able to show developers and financiers, some of them in the room around her, the promise of what she has in mind.

"Dreaming big is not irresponsible," Kradjian said.

But Paul Cirba, a commercial real estate agent in Johnson City, said it's impractical.

"If brownfields are No. 1 on the agenda, it's a farce," he said. "We don't have any buyers for brownfields. We have 2 million square feet of space that people can't give away."

That's not to say the environmental concern isn't valid, but it's unwise to mix environmental issues with economic ones, he said. If New York and Binghamton want economic development, they must cut taxes, Cirba said.

Patrick Doyle, the director of the Greater Binghamton Coalition, won't dispute that taxes are an issue, but so is land-use, and work-force development.

"All these things are issues. And we've got to address all of them," Doyle said.

That other communities have dreamed big was the point Charlie Bartsch of the Northeast Midwest Institute wanted to make. At BCC Monday, he showed slide after slide of projects other communities undertook with their brownfields. Their states, or the federal government, offered incentives from revolving loan funds to tax-abatement programs to liability insurance programs.

Broome County has benefited to a degree from one such program, which brought a $200,000 grant to assess brownfields. The other 436 grant recipients have seen $4.6 billion in investment to clean the sites, creating 20,000 jobs, Clinton said.

A 2002 brownfields act added $70 million to the federal fund for cleanups, bringing it to $167 million. Clinton said she hopes a similar act this year will be adopted, adding another $60 million a year.

None of that money can come to bear without local leadership, the senator said.

It's leadership County Executive Jeffrey P. Kraham said is here:

"You might have noticed our first report card," he said, referring to a six-month update of the Greater Binghamton Coalition's progress. "We're moving along, and soon we'll be at the head of the class."

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