Irving E. Cohen is Brooklyn born, but he’s adopted New Jersey as a second home. That’s because Cohen had tremendous success developing brownfields in the Garden State.

In the 1990s, Cohen’s firm, OENJ Cherokee Corp. cleaned and sold a 66-acre former landfill in Elizabeth, NJ. In 1998, the 1.3 million-square-foot Jersey Gardens Mall opened on the site, and the project created 5,000 jobs for a struggling post-industrial city. This and other projects made OENJ essentially “the catalyst for the changes in the brownfields mindset in New Jersey,” Cohen said.

Now Cohen’s new firm, Green Eagle LLC, wants to help redevelop a large Yonkers brownfield, but there’s a different obstacle. Unlike New Jersey and other states, New York State is known for creating regulatory roadblocks to brownfields redevelopment.

Now that may be changing. The state Legislature and the governor reached an agreement this year to revamp brownfield regulations and make cleanup standards clear, reform liability and jumpstart work with about $135 million each year in tax credits. After a glitch in June, the bill is expected to become law in the coming weeks.

“I’m smelling a change based on what some of the legislators are talking about and what some of the bills are saying,” Cohen said.

Aside from a new law, there are other hopeful signs for New York’s brownfields.

New York City is creating a brownfield strategy and establishing a revolving loan fund to help developers of the sites. “This administration is really looking much more diligently at the brownfields issue,” said Robert Kulikowski, director of the city’s Office of Environmental Coordination.

A New York chapter of the National Brownfield Association is holding its first meeting Sept. 29 at the Yonkers Library. Robert Colangelo, executive director of the national association, said the chapter is meant to encourage new real estate deals. Last year, President Bush signed legislation to create new brownfield cleanup grants.

Still, some urge caution. The new law would “would still make New York’s program one of the most stringent and non-user friendly in the country,” said Kenneth Kamlet, director of legal affairs for Newman Development Group, LLC, which has brownfield projects in New York. Attitudes will also have to change with regulations, others say.

Proponents of reusing brownfields say it’s an idea environmentalists and developers can love. “I’ve always viewed the brownfield issue as a win-win both for economic development and the economy and the environment,” said Kamlet.

“There aren’t too many issues that one can say that about.”

A brownfield is generally described as vacant or underutilized land, usually former industrial sites on waterfronts or in poor neighborhoods.

Frequently they are only perceived to be contaminated, but developers or banks won’t take the litigation risk.

The brownfield movement is about a decade old and grew out of “superfund” programs established to prevent another Love Canal-type disaster. Unlike superfund sites, people said brownfields were not as polluted and could be reused much easier.

The industry has expanded in the last decade, although its growth is hard to measure. “When a deal gets done, nobody plasters a sign on it, ‘This is a brownfield,’” said Colangelo of the National Brownfield Association.

“Somewhere along the line it starts as a brownfield and ends as a real estate transaction.”

In a 1996 count, New York City found it had 6,000 potential brownfields covering between 3,000 to 4,000 acres, although the real estate market likely gobbled many since then. Nationally there could be anywhere from 125,000 to 1 million brownfield sites, according to the National Brownfield Association.

Proponents say brownfields hold tremendous promise for older,

post-industrial cities in New York and elsewhere. Despite the criticism of New York’s program, 443 brownfield sites in the state have been or are in the process of being cleaned. In New York City, a former brewery is being converted to low-cost housing use in Bushwick and a site in Hunts Point is being turned into a public waterfront park.

New York’s current cleanup program is administrative, meaning that its guidelines are not codified into law. The nine-year-old “voluntary cleanup program” is run by the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

Owners or developers enter into an agreement with the DEC and get a release if the work is completed satisfactorily.

That process won’t change substantially, but experts say New York’s guidelines for cleanup will finally be spelled out in law. Standards can be related to the future use for the site, meaning that the state won’t take the impractical “eat the dirt” approach to every cleanup, said Kathryn S. Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City.

The bill has incentives for developers to bring land to residential standards, particularly in struggling neighborhoods. But brownfield developers argue that even basic cleanups take the land to a level far above whatever pollution naturally exists. The DEC says it does not know of an existing brownfield cleanup that failed and became a health hazard.

All this makes Cohen excited about his Yonkers project on the Hudson River, which is aimed to be mostly residential. His development team has not been selected yet, but he’s confident the project “could become a poster child” for New York brownfields redevelopment.