By Fred Arnold
Telescope Publisher
What do you do with an old gas station? If you’re like most smaller communities with limited resources, you put a ‘for sale’ sign out front and let it sit, hoping a developer will come along and clean it up and turn it into a viable property.
“It’s a problem right here in Belleville and most other towns I know of,” Belleville Chamber & Main Street director Waylon Sheetz said. “We’ve got several properties in Belleville that are just sitting because they were once a gas station, and no one wants to take the chance of having to deal with contaminated soil from fuel spills.”
Sheetz said those properties are very marketable. He said the old Ampride station on US 36 would be of particular interest as that portion of Belleville has seen a great deal of expansion in recent years.
But help is available.
Information was presented last week at a North Central Kansas Regional Planning meeting in Beloit highlighting Brownfields Program Grants that are avilable to communities. Attending from Belleville was local realtor, David Blecha.
“I think this is a pretty big deal,” Blecha told the Telescope. “Properties like the one on 36, as well as a couple of others in town, would be a lot easier to market if people knew the EPA wasn’t going to come in.”
Brownfields offers several types of grants that could assist Belleville. The cleanup grant provides funding for a grant recipient to carry out cleanup activities as approved sites. There are also assessment grants, revolving loan fund grants and multi-purpose grants that provide funding for various aspects of a locations reclamation.
According to Republic County Economic Development director, Jenny Russell, the Brownfields programs have been around since 1955.
“Oftentimes Brownfields is pursued when there is significant redevelopment occurring on sites that have concerns,” she said. “One of the last times that I looked to use Brownfields on a project, it was to tear down a building that was thought to have lead paint.”
Russell said she would be happy to look at any project that could involve Brownfields grant funds, an avenue which both Sheetz and Blecha said they felt was important to pursue.
“Most of our development recently has been on Highway 36 for some reason,” Sheetz said. “I think if this program is available, we’d be foolish not to take advantage of it, developers would sure be a lot more interested and it would be easier to sell,” Blecha added.