Regulatory incentives to promote private sector brownfield remediation and reuse

Governments of growing industrial economies are faced with two substantial sources of urban environmental degradation-one from past activities and one from ongoing activities. The interior of mature urban communities often contain large areas of environmental contamination from past industrial activity. These sites are commonly known as brownfields and often sit unmarketable and vacant, allowing the contamination to spread into the surrounding groundwater, land and air environments. Simultaneously, urban growth is diverted to envelop greenfields-open space agricultural land and wildlife habitat on the borders of the urban area-creating a second front of degradation commonly known as urban or suburban sprawl. Resolution of both environmental problems created by historical contamination and non-sustainable land-use can be achieved by private sector redevelopment of brownfields. However, environmental laws and government policies well intentioned to restore or protect the environment often, in reality, inhibit or prevent brownfields redevelopment. The most common of these are laws assigning legal liability for the past contamination to those willing to purchase or undertake remediation and redevelopment projects and the high transaction costs and long delays in these projects due to regulatory requirements. This paper reports on five governmental policies that could facilitate the remediation and reuse of brownfields: 1. Necessity-Government lawmakers and regulators must recognize the necessity of immediately addressing the two most significant sources of environmental degradation in urban and suburban communities. 2. Immunity-Environmental laws should be amended to provide immunity to innocent parties who are willing to invest in the remediation of past contamination. 3. Efficiency-Regulatory oversight agencies should implement streamlined processes in their regulatory oversight of site cleanups to reduce the time and transaction cost of each brownfield redevelopment. 4. Certainty-Regulatory oversight agencies should enhance predictability of the final cleanup remedy, and thus the cost and time required for any discrete set of environmental contaminants. 5. Flexibility-Regulatory oversight agencies should provide flexibility to pal-ties willing to invest in the remediation of contaminated sites in the scope and level of cleanups through utilization of institutional controls appropriate for varied end uses.