With increasing federal funding opportunities for brownfield assessment and remediation, it’s more important than ever for municipalities to have an organized, publicly informed, and objective program for addressing abandoned and potentially contaminated properties. The first step in this process is creating a comprehensive brownfields inventory. Use of a customizable database and interactive web maps like Esri’s ArcGIS StoryMaps with development of the inventory can offer powerful, ever-evolving tools to meet a variety of informational and decision-making needs during redevelopment.
A well-developed brownfields inventory is more than just a list of all the brownfield properties in your community. By prioritizing your database based on community-driven criteria, you can coordinate your community’s available resources with other community goals, such as municipal master plans, redevelopment plans, and climate resiliency initiatives. Additionally, it facilitates collaboration between administrative departments, community stakeholders, funders, and developers. Learn more about database criteria here: https://brsinc.com/know-what-you-have-inventorying-and-prioritizing-brownfield-sites/
A versatile, database-driven brownfields inventory offers a wealth of capabilities, including:
- Easily providing you with due diligence information, such as tax parcel data, ownership and site use history, and deed restrictions, that can help guide decision making during property acquisitions.
- Identifying clusters of sites that could be targeted in neighborhood development initiatives.
- Quickly generating lists of sites that fit into funding criteria for grant opportunities based on site characteristics or proximity to critical resources such as schools, parks, and ecologically sensitive areas.
- Creating easy-to-understand marketing sheets that can be used to attract developers or communicate strategies and progress to the community and stakeholders.
In an information-rich age, a database-driven brownfields inventory is an investment in your community that centralizes critical information so that it is easily accessible and, more importantly, is a living tool that can be used to streamline redevelopment efforts in your community.
