An eight-year-long city initiative to clean up a heavily contaminated 'brownfield' reached a culminating point this month. The Ohio EPA cleared the way for redevelopment of the Queensgate South industrial/business site on Mehring Way. The former junkyard is now a potential development site featuring 17 acres zoned for office, industrial or high-tech use.
"That was a long time coming," said Cincinnati Business Development Manager William Fischer. He explained that 50 years of use as a scrap yard had left the roughly 16-acre site contaminated with PCBs, heavy metals and petroleum products. This meant that any remediation work would have to meet the approval of both state and federal officials.
"There were contaminants on the site that were regulated by both the US and Ohio EPA," Fischer said. "It was a lot of work to coordinate those cleanups."
Remediation of long-contaminated sites like this one is often a lengthy, expensive process, and this was no exception. The city's
Strategic Program for Urban Redevelopment (SPUR) identified the site in 2001, and began establishing development agreements to conduct remediation over the next two years. In 2003, the city and Queensgate South Realty LLC partnered to win a $3 million Clean Ohio Revitalization Fund grant. That began the process of remediating the site: crews removed the hazardous materials, or contained them so that they could not escape into the surrounding environment. The resulting cleanup earned the site covenant-not-to-sue protection from the Ohio EPA: future property owners will be protected from liability for the site's toxic past.
The remediation project turned the site of Cincinnati's first rail yard and a long-time environmental eyesore into a development opportunity Fischer hopes will compete with the best the area's suburbs have to offer.
"The site is obviously a good location for industry that needs to be close to the river, to downtown and to Northern Kentucky," he said. "It's a very key piece of property. This kind of levels the playing field a little bit."
He added that the remediation project is being completed at an appropriate time; the economic turnaround is slowly increasing business interest in new development. Companies that had held tight to their purse strings are beginning to explore new expansion or relocation projects, and he said a number have started exploring the city.
"We've got brokers calling us looking for sites for new construction. I haven't had calls with that level of excitement coming in a while."
Writer:
Matt Cunningham
Enjoy this story?
Sign up for free solutions-based reporting in your inbox each week.