MS - Ocean Springs to Transform Government Street

Assistance from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) through its Targeted Brownfield Assessment (TBA) Program has helped the City of Ocean Springs with the purchase of the former Fallo's Dry Cleaners site on Government Street. The 0.67-acre site was purchased for $286,000 through the grant funds and environmentally assessed through the MDEQ's TBA program. It's all part of a $4.6M streetscapes CDBG project that's been in the works since Hurricane Katrina.

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Atlanta - Opportunity Zone Update

On December 6, Atlanta City Council passed legislation authorizing changes to the City of Atlanta's Urban Redevelopment Plan, enabling ADA to submit an application to the Department of Community Affairs for an Opportunity Zone (OZ) designation within the city. Opportunity zones are a state redevelopment tool designed to help communities bring jobs to areas with pervasive poverty, defined as as a poverty rate of more than 15 percent.

Once this designation is approved by the DCA, it will provide local companies with increased incentives and benefits for job creation. An OZ allows companies located within its boundaries to receive $3,500 per job per year for five years: a total of $17,500, for every net new job created. Any legal business entity creating two or more jobs within one year could qualify for these credits. Many of Atlanta's neighboring communities already have Opportunity Zones in place and have experienced significant job creation in these targeted geographic regions.

Atlanta's OZ application will focus on industrial areas, office properties, and small business zones. We hope to have our application into DCA for approval no later than December 31, 2010. If you have questions about the City of Atlanta's OZ application, please contact Amanda Shailendra at 404.614.8299 or ashailendra@atlantada.com.

NC - Hickory received a 2010 ICMA Annual Award for Community Sustainability for its Operation No Vacancy program.

[From ICMA] - Between 2000 and 2009, a steep decline in manufacturing left over 3 million square feet of vacant space in commercial buildings within the Hickory, North Carolina, (Mick Berry, city manager, and Andrea Surratt, assistant city manager) metro area, especially along the city’s two rail corridors. To address this blight, a council member suggested using an existing list of more than 190 vacant or underused commercial properties and researching the properties for their redevelopment potential. Thus began Operation No Vacancy.

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Atlanta selected for EPA Pilot Program

The United States Environmental Protection Agency has selected the City of Atlanta as a Brownfields Area-Wide Planning Pilot Program grant recipient. The city is focusing on a 3,282-acre project area in southwest Atlanta, which consists of five redevelopment locations within two miles of each other, connected by commercial and industrial corridors. From 2006 to 2009, more than 3,500 jobs were lost in the project area. The area includes at least 25 brownfields, including a former auto service and repair shop, heavy industrial facilities and vacant warehouses. The city has been involved since 2005 in two redevelopment plans that identified the need and provided the framework for future area-wide brownfield planning in the project area. These plans will be the critical next step in coordi­nating community involvement around the assessment, cleanup, and reuse of brownfields in the project area, helping to anchor the area's commercial, industrial, residential and greenspace redevelopment. To learn more about this program, contact Charles Whatley at 404.614.8288 or cwhatley@atlantada.com.