Struggling Towns See EPA Project as Way to Salvation

To the untrained eye, the view from the vacant storefronts lining what was once the thriving downtown of this Atlantic Coast seaport is a rural tableau of rust and rot.

Across Mason Avenue lies a decrepit railroad yard and a couple of derelict fishing boats. The town dump, on the other side of the tracks, was abandoned three decades ago but was only fenced off last month. The land is littered with old rail cars, a heap of rubber resting behind chain-link fencing and shards of concrete blocks nearly hidden by overgrowth.

To the Clinton administration, the view offers something else. Here at the coastal midpoint between Maine and Miami, amid the marshes and inlets, truck farms and poultry processors of Virginia’s Eastern Shore, lies a new path to economic salvation for struggling communities across the nation.

Worn-out Cape Charles is one of 15 initial sites chosen as pilot projects under a new Environmental Protection Agency program known as Brownfields. It is typical of the problems the $10-million program is meant to cure: It is neither horribly polluted, as far as anyone knows, nor is it ready for immediate development.

The goal is to turn the 100 acres of industrial detritus that forms a horseshoe of neglect around the town harbor into a job-creating, revenue-producing industrial park, without the air and water pollution that historically accompany such development. It is a goal that Northampton County, despite its rural setting and shrinking population (14,625 in 1980, 12,900 in 1994) shares with big industrial centers like Trenton, N.J.; Cleveland; Detroit and Birmingham, Ala.

But it cannot be achieved until the community can find out what lies buried in the wind-blown lots now mostly covered by dried grass, rail ties and concrete.

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That’s where the Brownfields program comes in. The administration is making up to $200,000 in federal money available to the community to determine, with old maps, aerial photography and core samples of possibly tainted earth, how the land was used in the past and whether any toxic chemicals have seeped into the ground. The funds will also be used to develop a strategy for cleaning up whatever is found.

That kind of investigation is a crucial step in convincing potential investors that they will not become liable for cleaning up a site that was polluted years before they arrived--one of the key stumbling blocks, real estate experts say, to redeveloping abandoned industrial centers.

“The mere whiff of contamination can cause lenders and developers to avoid Brownfields out of fear that the potential site--or some unplanned consequence of their cleaning it up--may somehow trigger state or federal liability and cleanup requirements,” wrote Michael Harrold, a policy analyst for Citizens for a Sound Economy, a fiscally conservative research organization.

The program is a centerpiece of the administration’s environmental agenda, developed with the idea of returning jobs to locations where people live--and need jobs--rather than building new industrial parks atop once-green farm fields or in mowed-down woods along highways to which future workers would commute by car.

It has caught the attention of “venture investors as well as commercial banks,” said Johnine Brown, an environmental lawyer in Chicago.

It has even won guarded praise from House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas), a former insect exterminator who has led the charge of House Republicans against nearly every other phase of the administration’s environmental program.

But it elicits wary skepticism from some environmentalists concerned that the Brownfields campaign will give too much weight to economic issues and not enough to protecting local communities against industrial pollution.

“It’s still too early in the developmental process to give a definitive answer whether it’s working,” said Vernice Miller, director of environmental justice initiatives at the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York.

The Brownfields program to a large degree is a reaction to the mind-numbing problems--mostly a tangled web of litigation--that developed in the Superfund program, now a decade-and-a-half old and seriously bogged down as the federal government tries to use it to force the cleanup of some of the most polluted dumps and abandoned factories in the nation.

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But, Miller asked, in overcoming the shortcomings of that program--and the fear it has induced in would-be developers wary of lawsuits--is Brownfields leaning too far in the direction of the real estate industry?

“The community should be the focus, not just the lenders, insurers, past polluters and developers. The community has to be the center of the process,” she said.

For the investor, the questions posed by Brownfields sites are simple, said Howard Epstein, a spokesman for real estate developers in New York: “You’re looking at two factors--what’s my liability and how do I make the property economically viable?”

With such questions in mind, the EPA has moved to limit the liability of investors who develop sites that might have contained hazardous waste.

“Brownfield purchasers will not be liable for the mess they inherited and neither will those who lend to them to finance the cleanup,” Clinton said recently.

The administration also has prepared a $2-billion tax incentive to encourage development in communities where at least one-fifth of the residents live below the poverty level. It would allow investors to deduct cleanup expenses immediately, rather than requiring them to amortize the costs over many years. The administration estimates that the tax break will produce $10 billion in private cleanup investment.

In Cape Charles, the first potential tenant to express interest in the Brownfields site is Solar Building Systems--which now has temporary quarters at the north end of Northampton County, nearly an hour’s drive away--to produce siding and roofing materials containing energy-producing solar panels.

The company has hired out-of-work crab pickers, whose talents at jobs requiring fine-motor coordination--in this case, soldering computer chips--were honed pulling bits of meat from the shells of Chesapeake Bay crabs in a much lower-tech operation.

In a community that owes to the bay both its birth and near-death, there could not be a more fitting example of the shifts taking place in both the economy and the environment.

Situated on a narrow spit of sandy soil between the Atlantic Ocean and the Chesapeake Bay, Cape Charles was founded in 1886 as a port for barges and ferries carrying traffic of the New York, Philadelphia & Norfolk Railroad across the mouth of the bay to and from Norfolk, Va. It thrived, with numerous hotels and four movie theaters (one remains), into the 1950s.

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But in 1965, a 17.6-mile, two-lane bridge and tunnel was built to span the southern entrance to the bay. The railroad pulled out, and ferry service ended too. Today, two short freight trains run along the single lane of track each day, picking up and delivering cargo along the bay’s eastern shore. That’s not enough to support the terminus here.

“Cape Charles,” said Katherine Mears, a resident since 1952, “needs all the help it can get.”

The official figures bear out her observation. One in 10 homes in Cape Charles lacks indoor plumbing; more than that could use a coat of paint to cover bare wood. Nearly 30% of its 1,300 residents live below the poverty line.

“If you look at any socioeconomic indicator, we’re at the bottom. There’s a real urgency,” said Timothy E. Hayes, director of sustainable development for Northampton County.

But the community’s needs, he said, are matched by “the richness of the environment--we’re just about the last part of the East Coast” that hasn’t undergone development.

Here, 70 miles south of the Maryland state line, are bays and marshes and farmland; islands named Hog and Mockhorn and Ship Shoal. The Cherrystone inlet from the Chesapeake just north of town gave its name to a unique species of sweet clams. In the village are historic homes and Victorian buildings.

And right in the center of town sits the tumbledown rail yard, dump and harbor.

“The railroad and the dump--as far as we know there were no companies with bad chemicals there, but who knows?” Hayes said. “But we’re dealing with perceptions as well as with reality when it comes to investment, so we’ve got to get a clean bill of health.”

The $200,000 that the administration is making available to investigate the property, said Thomas E. Harris, the county administrator, has “made it more economically feasible to market the county.”

“In my mind,” he said, “the whole concept fits in with the right development patterns for the shore, in the villages and towns. Instead of moving out to farmland, we can develop an area that has been the cultural and economic center of Northampton County.”