The City of Janesville cordially invites you to an important and interactive meeting to help guide our new brownfields program. A “brownfield” property is one where expansion, redevelopment or reuse is complicated by the presence, or potential presence, of contamination or pollution. As a result, brownfield properties often sit vacant or are underutilized and can begin to take on a blighted appearance. To help combat these problems, the City was awarded a $400,000 grant from the US Environmental Protection Agency to create an inventory of potential brownfield sites and to conduct environmental assessments on those deemed to be a priority.
This is where you come in. To help ensure that our Brownfields Program provides the greatest benefits to the community, we need you and your neighbors to help us identify the primary community issues that should be addressed by the program. Community issues may include concerns related to the natural or physical environment, or social and economic concerns. The meeting will include interactive exercises where community members will work individually and with each other to identify and prioritize community issues.
The issues identified at the meeting will be used to help the City select properties for environmental assessments to determine whether contaminants are present and, if so, to what extent. This is a critical first step toward their ultimate clean-up (where necessary) and redevelopment. Further, our newly-established Health Monitoring Committee will develop tracking mechanisms to measure how the redevelopment of brownfield sites is actually impacting the identified community issues.
We look forward to seeing you at the meeting and hearing your ideas. Additional information about our Comprehensive Brownfields Program can be found on our website at www.janesvillewi.gov. From the homepage, click on “Departments & Services” and select “Community Development” from the pull down menu. Then from the menu on the left-hand side of the page, click on “Redevelopment Program.”
Click here to view the agenda for the June 6th meeting.
For more information, contact Al Hulick at 755-3059.
