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Grant offers Mon Valley revitalized future
Saturday, March 13, 1999 By Don Hopey, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Former industrial sites in Duquesne, McKeesport and Clairton are looking a bit greener today and it has nothing to do with the parading Irish.
Vice President Al Gore announced yesterday that those Monongahela Valley "brownfield" sites will get $200,000 in federal greenbacks as one of 23 new pilot redevelopment projects funded nationwide.
Duquesne will receive the grant, which will be administered through the Steel Valley Authority, to do environmental assessments at McKees Point in McKeesport, the former Hercules Co. property in Clairton and the Grant Steel property in Duquesne.
"This grant is one more step in reindustrializing the entire region," said Mayor George Matta of Duquesne. "It will show that these communities, once the backbone of the Steel Valley, are good places to do business once again."
Matta said the money will enable the communities to complete environmental assessments, identify cleanup needs and compete with never before developed "greenfield" sites for new industry and business.
The grant will also be used to hold community meetings on how the former industrial sites should be redeveloped, and form committees to monitor risk assessment, community health, job training and environmental justice issues.
"We want to create a community-based awareness of what should be, what needs to be, done. We want to get community participation in answering how the redevelopment projects will affect jobs and quality of life," said Steve Pholar, the Steel Valley Authority's coordinator for the West-to-West Coalition, an organization of 22 Mon Valley communities stretching 10 miles from West Elizabeth to West Homestead.
Those communities, once the heart of the nation's iron, steel, coke, chemical, glass and electrical manufacturing industries, experienced significant industrial losses beginning in the late 1970s and extending through the 1980s. The traumatic collapse of those key industries hurt smaller commercial businesses and ruined the communities' prosperity.
An inventory by the Steel Valley Authority lists 52 brownfield sites totaling 1,420 acres.
Pholar said the pilot projects are designed to build momentum toward economic redevelopment for the entire Mon Valley.
Since 1995, the EPA has funded more than 200 Brownfields Assessment Demonstration Pilots at up to $200,000 each to support creative two-year explorations and demonstrations of how to redevelop abandoned industrial sites.
Last year, one of the EPA's Brownfield pilot project grants was awarded to Pittsburgh for its Nine Mile Run project, which eventually will develop more than 600 new housing units, 100,000 square feet of commercial retail space and 80 acres of park land on 230 acres of slag piles along the Monongahela River.
Neville Township has submitted an application for a pilot brownfield grant in 2000.
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