Officials with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently visited southeast Iowa, touring abandoned industrial sites that are being cleaned up using eight-and-a-half million dollars in federal brownfields grants.
Jim Macy, regional administrator for the EPA region that covers Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, and Kansas, says the grants awarded to Keokuk add up to the largest pool of brownfields assessment and cleanup funding for a single site in the region.
Macy says, “They’ve achieved over $8.5 million in federal capitalization to grow the community, to turn these blighted areas into blooming flowers.”
Turning the Elkem Carbide site into a blooming flower is still a work in progress. The 80-acre site housed a zinc smelting facility and manufactured carbides before being abandoned about two decades ago.
Macy says cleanup has included demolition of buildings, assessments of what’s in the ground, and how the city will address it.
“Just a holistic approach of what’s going on to clean up this property, to put it back up on the market, have a developer come in, and if they can salvage a couple of the buildings and revitalize those, that would just be icing on the cake,” Macy says.
The EPA is also awarding of a pair of one-million-dollar grants for other projects in southeast Iowa, including one to Burlington. The city will use the funding to start work on the long-abandoned Klein Memorial Hospital property.
Burlington City Manager Chad Bird says they’ll need to remove asbestos and leaky underground storage tanks. Like in Keokuk, Bird says it’s not just a matter of cleaning up the site, as they want to re-use it.
“We want to get that old building demolished, and then we want to convert that area into some residential housing,” Bird says. “We have already been in conversations with some economic development folks about getting residential there once it’s clean. So we’re already moving that far down the road.”
The hospital building dates back to 1962, while it closed in 2009.
The EPA also awarded a one-million dollar grant to the Southeast Iowa Regional Planning Commission, which will use the funding for two projects each in Keokuk, Fort Madison, and Donnellson.
(Richard Egger, Tri-States Radio)