Senator Hillary
Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., answers questions Monday while meeting
with Broome Community College students at the Brownfield
Redevelopment Workshop.
CHUCK HAUPT /
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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