Commentary: Report Card on the Market‐Based Approach to Brownfield Redevelopment

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12345
• Published date: 01 March 2015
• Date: 01 March 2015

Commentary

Bruce Rasher is redevelopment manager

for the Revitalizing Auto Communities

Environmental Response (RACER) Trust,

which was created in 2011 to clean and

redevelop former General Motors sites. He

chairs the Association of Redevelopment

Initiatives, serves on the Urban Land

Institute’s Redevelopment and Reuse

Council, and was a two-term mayor of

Marshall, Michigan.

E-mail: brasher@racertrust.org

262 Public Administration Review • March | April 2015

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 75, Iss. 2, pp. 262–263. © 2015 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12345.

more private involvement and faster cleanups for the

industrial reuse of brownf‌i elds, as I have long held

the opinion that the costs of the remedy to achieve

a safe and protective cleanup for industrial uses are

generally materially less than for residential reuse and

therefore much more manageable. Concurrent with

the enactment of liability reforms and the creation of

brownf‌i elds incentives, there were signif‌i cant changes

to determining “how clean is clean” for brownf‌i elds in

cleanup programs at the federal and state levels. Land

use–based and risk-based cleanup standards that led to

presumptive remedies and a two-tier system of clean-

ups—residential and nonresidential (e.g., industrial,

commercial)—streamlined the process of cleanups

and dramatically reduced their costs.

Another example is that it is not surprising to me to

see that the requirement for public hearings appears

not to have contributed to more cleanups. Most

private developers (and their sources of private capital,

both equity and debt) whom I know strive to reduce

the level of uncertainty for all aspects of their projects

so as to increase the probability of reaching their

f‌i nancial goals. One tenet of uncertainty for develop-

ers is that “time is the enemy” of achieving targeted

f‌i nancial returns because the longer you have to

f‌i nance your carrying costs, the more your f‌i nancial

pro forma gets punished. Public hearings are widely

regarded by developers as a wildcard in terms of costs

and often are perceived as a cause of signif‌i cant delay

of projects. But, as to the central focus of this article’s

exercise, some, myself included, may even conclude

that these f‌i ndings are a vindication the New Public

Management approach to brownf‌i elds in that there

has apparently been an increase in private involve-

ment in brownf‌i eld cleanup and redevelopment since

the abandonment of the stick and the adoption of the

carrot.

While this article provides many valuable insights into

brownf‌i eld redevelopment trends that have occurred

since the mid-1990s, for me, it raises some related

questions. First, did the widespread fear of strict,

The f‌i ndings of Adam Eckerd and Roy L.

Heidelberg in their article “Public Incentives,

Market Motivations, and Contaminated

Properties: New Public Management and Brownf‌i eld

Liability Reform” represent a long-overdue “audit” of

what was a signif‌i cant paradigm shift in the approach

to the cleanup and redevelopment of brownf‌i elds in

the United States.  is shift was undertaken through

the enactment of laws by Congress and state legisla-

tures and through regulatory reforms supported by

federal and state environmental regulatory agencies

beginning in the mid-1990s, going from a command

and control enforcement framework to the use of

buyer liability protections and public f‌i nancial incen-

tives to induce more private investment in brown-

f‌i elds.  e goals of this shift were to increase the

number of cleanups, accelerate the pace of cleanups,

reduce the threats to public health and the environ-

ment posed by uncontrolled sites of environmental

contamination, foster the reuse of blighted proper-

ties, restore employment and tax base, and increase

reuse of public infrastructure at brownf‌i elds, as well as

reduce the incentives for greenf‌i eld development.  is

shift enjoyed fairly broad bipartisan legislative support

as well as support by regulatory agencies, the business

community, local governments, and, to a lesser extent,

community and environmental groups, as the old way

clearly was not working very well.

I have spent a fair portion of my career working

with brownf‌i elds, f‌i rst as a representative of a PRP

(potentially responsible party), overseeing the cleanup

of brownf‌i elds under an enforcement regime, and

then as either the owner, seller, buyer, or developer of

brownf‌i elds, acting as a third-party deal facilitator of

brownf‌i eld redevelopment and taking advantage of

buyer liability protections and packaging public f‌i nan-

cial incentives in one way or another to ef‌f ectuate the

cleanup and redevelopment of brownf‌i elds.

Some of the f‌i ndings of this article conf‌i rm my obser-

vations as a longtime practitioner. For example, it is

not surprising to me at all to see that there has been

Report Card on the Market-Based Approach

to Brownf‌i eld Redevelopment

Bruce Rasher

Revitalizing Auto Communities Environmental Response (RACER) Trust